Peter Godwin

On November 18, Peter Godwin performed at Joe’s Pub for Seriously Entertaining, speaking on the theme “My Family and Other Tragedies.”

Peter Godwin is an award-winning journalist and memoirist whose work blends reportage with personal reflection. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, he has spent much of his career writing about Africa’s turbulent history and his own complicated ties to it. In his latest memoir, Exit Wounds, Godwin reflects on the aftershocks of violence—how political upheaval and private loss converge, and how their traces endure.

Whether documenting war, exile, or the quiet devastations of family life, Godwin confronts tragedy with an unflinching eye and a journalist’s instinct for human detail. He began his career practicing human rights law before becoming a foreign correspondent. Over the decades, he has reported from more than 60 countries—including conflict zones in Angola, Mozambique, Bosnia, and the Congo.

His six nonfiction books, among them Mukiwa, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, and The Fear, probe the legacies of colonialism and the fault lines of identity and belonging. Together they form an extraordinary body of work about violence, displacement, and the search for home—one that has earned Godwin the George Orwell Prize, the Esquire-Apple-Waterstones Award, and the Borders Original Voices Award.

A former East European and diplomatic correspondent for The Sunday Times and chief correspondent for the BBC’s flagship foreign affairs program Assignment, Godwin has also made award-winning documentaries, including The Industry of Death, which won the Gold Medal for investigative film at the New York Film Festival. His writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, and Men’s Journal. A former president of PEN America, Godwin is an Orwell Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, and has taught writing at Princeton, Columbia, Wesleyan, and the New School. He lives in New York City.