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Author and journalist Kurt Pitzer is a former commercial long-line fisherman and relief worker who has reported from some of the world’s most turbulent regions, including the Balkans, the Middle East, Afghanistan and Iraq. He has written for many publications, including the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones magazine, BBC Radio and People magazine. He is the 2007 winner of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize for his documentary work in Kosovo, Serbia and Bosnia. In 2003, he was embedded with the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division during the invasion of Iraq. Soon after arriving in Baghdad he met the former head of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear centrifuge program, Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, and helped him escape with his family to the United States. Their co-written book, The Bomb in My Garden (Wiley, 2004), was called “never less than riveting” by The New York Times Book Review and is being developed into a film by Johnny Depp’s production company, Infinitum Nihil.
Pitzer has worked as a toy company consultant, journalism professor, pharmacy delivery guy and sports commentator on Nigerian television. He spent nearly three years in the swordfishing fleets of the Caribbean, Atlantic and Pacific waters before moving to a remote village on the Thai-Burmese border, where he built a rickety bamboo hut to live in, survived a near-deadly bout of typhus and helped raise money for Karen tribal refugees. He got his first break in journalism covering the Rodney King beating trial and the L.A. riots of 1992 for City News Service and The Associated Press. He wrote nearly five hundred bylined articles for the Los Angeles Times and dozens of features as a news correspondent for People magazine before moving to Denmark, then the Mediterannean coast of Spain, where he lived for six years. He has covered political uprisings and natural disasters on several continents, the heroin trade routes of Iran, the troubles of coal mining in Appalachia, militants in the Gaza Strip and three World Cup soccer tournaments, and has negotiated a partnership between the African National Congress and a Danish hearing aid company. He has been a semi-frequent guest lecturer in both Europe and the U.S. His latest book, Eating with the Enemy, about the unlikely friendship between a mobbed-up New Jersey restaurant owner and a North Korean ambassador, was published by St. Martin’s Press in April 2010. He lives in New York.
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