WORD Presents Anjan Sundaram

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About the Book

Award-winning journalist Anjan Sundaram, hailed as “the Indian successor to Kapuscinski” (Basharat Peer) and praised for “remarkable” (Jon Stewart), “excellent” (Fareed Zakaria), and “courageous and heartfelt” (The Washington Post) work, must reckon with the devastating personal cost of war correspondence when he travels to the Central African Republic to report on preparations for a genocide hidden from the world, leaving his wife and newborn behind in Canada

After ten years of reporting from central Africa for The New York Times, Associated Press, and others, Anjan Sundaram finds himself living a quiet life in Shippagan, Canada, with his wife and newborn. But when word arrives of preparations for ethnic cleansing in the Central African Republic, he is suddenly torn between his duty as a husband and father, and his moral responsibility to report on a conflict unseen by the world.

Soon he is traveling through the CAR, with a driver who may be a spy, bearing witness to ransacked villages and locals fleeing imminent massacre, fielding offers of mined gold and hearing stories of soldiers who steal schoolbooks for rolling paper. When he refuses to return home, journeying instead into a rebel stronghold, he learns that there is no going back to the life he left behind.

Breakup illuminates the personal price that war correspondents pay as they bear witness on the frontlines of humanitarian crimes across the world. This brilliantly introspective, grounded account of one man’s inner turmoil in the context of a dangerous journey through a warzone is sure to become a modern classic.

About the author:

Anjan Sundaram is the award-winning author of Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship and Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo. His war correspondence won a Frontline Club Award in 2015 and a Reuters award in 2006 and was short-listed for the Prix Bayeux in 2015. Sundaram graduated from Yale University, where he studied mathematics, and holds a PhD in journalism from the University of East Anglia.

In conversation with

Janine di Giovanni is the Executive Director and co-Founder of The Reckoning Project, a war crimes unit in Ukraine that documents atrocities and helps build cases for international mechanisms. She is an award-winning war reporter, author, and academic specializing in human rights. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Harpers, the New York Times, The Washington  Post, The New York Review of Books and has been widely anthologized. Her nine books include The Vanishing: Faith, Loss, and the Twilight of Christianity in the Land of the Prophets and The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria.  A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, and has won more than 12 awards for her writing.  A life member of The Council on Foreign Relations, she is a former Senior Fellow at Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. 

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