George Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic. From 2003 to 2018, he was a staff writer at the New Yorker.
He is the author of, most recently, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal (Cape, 2021), Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (Knopf, 2019)—winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Hitchens Prize—and The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013). A recipient of the 2013 National Book Award for Nonfiction and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Packer is also the author of four previous works of nonfiction (all from FSG): The Village of Waiting (2001); Blood of the Liberals, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award; The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, named one of the ten best books of 2005 by the New York Times Book Review; and Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade (2009). He has also written two novels, The Half Man (Random House, 1991) and Central Square (Graywolf, 1998) and is the editor of The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World (Harper, 2003) and a two-volume edition of George Orwell’s essays. His play, Betrayed, won the 2008 Lucille Lortel award for Best Off-Broadway Play.
A 2009 Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Packer is the recipient of two Overseas Press Club Awards (2003), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2001-2002), and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant (2017). He is a member of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting’s international board of directors.
