Rory Stewart – Year of election 2009

Rory Stewart’s first book, The Places in Between, the account of a 6,000-mile walk across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal in the winter of 2001-02, was saluted by The New York Times as “a flat-out masterpiece. [It] is, in very nearly every sense, too good to be true.” Published in 2004, it won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, a Scottish Arts Council book award, the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Writing Award and the Premio de Literatura de Viajes Camino del Cid. His second book, Occupational Hazards (2006), covered his 11 months in 2003-04 as coalition deputy governor of two provinces in the Marsh Arab region of southern Iraq. He has spent five years since in Kabul establishing the charity Turquoise Mountain and is now Ryan Professor of Human Rights at Harvard University.

Stewart was born in Hong Kong in 1973, grew up in Malaysia and has served in the British army and the Foreign Office. He was appointed OBE in 2004. “I am interested,” he says, “in what is bewildering and infuriating in my encounters with other cultures. I want to expose the surreal pretensions of international policy. I want to show how little we know.”