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SIPA Faculty
Peter Godwin
International Affairs Building, 13th Floor
Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs
Phone: 212-854-3213
pg2258@columbia.edu
Biography:
Peter Godwin grew up in Africa. He studied law at Cambridge university, and international relations at Oxford. He is an award winning foreign correspondent, author, documentary-maker and screenwriter.
After practicing human rights law in Zimbabwe, he became a foreign and war correspondent, and has reported from over 60 countries, including wars in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Somalia, Congo, Ivory Coast, Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kashmir and the last years of apartheid South Africa. He served as East European correspondent and Diplomatic correspondent for the London Sunday Times, and chief correspondent for BBC television's flagship foreign affairs program, Assignment (now Correspondent), making documentaries from such places as Cuba, Panama, Indonesia, Pakistan, Spain, Northern Ireland, the Philippines, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, the Baltics, and the Balkans as it descended into war. His film, The Industry of Death, about the sex trade in Thailand, won the gold medal for investigative film at the New York Film Festival.
He also wrote and co-presented a three part series 'Africa Unmasked' for Britain's Channel Four. He has written for a wide array of magazines and newspapers including Vanity Fair, National Geographic, New York Times magazine, Time, and Newsweek, the Observer (London) and the Guardian (London.)
He is the author of five non fiction books: 'Rhodesians Never Die' - The Impact of war and Political Change on White Rhodesia c.1970 - 1980 (with Ian Hancock), Wild at Heart: Man and Beast in Southern Africa (with photos by Chris Johns and foreword by Nelson Mandela), The Three of Us - a New Life in New York (with Joanna Coles) and Mukiwa, which he received the George Orwell prize and the Esquire-Apple-Waterstones award. His latest book is When a Crocodile Eats the Sun - a Memoir of Africa.
He has taught writing at the New School, Princeton and Sarah Lawrence College.