Hugh Pope
Author, Reporter, Editor
Year: 2010
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What’s an author to do when he hears that, before his new book is even printed or presented, it’s been sold in the charity shops for a couple of bucks? I love being a writer. I wouldn’t want to be anything else. But sometimes my trade feels like an uphill struggle. My first commercially published…
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David Byrne’s endorsement of Dining with al-Qaeda
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The Audiobook CD of Dining with al-Qaeda will go on sale shortly after the book is published on 16 March. The reader is Paul Boehmer, a soft-spoken American theater actor acclaimed for his ability to give voice to everybody from Thai police detectives, pimps and prostitutes to reading out Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. The…
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Thrilled to see top-of-the-bill ranking for my last book, Sons of the Conquerors: the Rise of the Turkic World ! New York’s Foreign Affairs magazine on 23 September 2009 listed the book’s account of my Central Asian and other Turkic journeys first among the 20 titles judged essential for ‘What to Read on Turkish Politics’…
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One of the Arab world’s leading international magazines, al-Majalla, gave its readers a heads-up about the forthcoming publication of Dining with al-Qaeda in the new titles section of its 9 January edition. The 30 years Pope has spent living and travelling in the Middle East, from a 1980 visit as an Oxford student through a…
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Leafing through the summer 2009 edition of Washington’s “Democracy: A Journal of Ideas”, I stumbled across an interesting critique of the U.S. media performance in the run-up to, during, and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq – a central theme of the last quarter of my new book, Dining with al-Qaeda. In the article, Leslie…
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There’s one line in the Publishers Weekly review of Dining with al-Qaeda — the one about the “exquisite photographs” — that made me expecially proud. The reviewers at PW even took the rare step of publishing this image (only viewable in their print edition): When I first sent the book to the publısher there was…
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John Ash writes poetry that I really love, and his new collection “In the Wake of the Day”, just published by Carcanet, once again offers great moments of hovering between East and West, ancient and modern, the personal and the historical. Ash nearly drops his pose of elegant nonchalance once or twice when he edges…
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The French rights to Dining with al-Qaeda have already been sold! The translation will be done by Les Presses de l’universite Laval in Quebec, a respected Canadian university press. PUL will soon also be publishing a translation into French of my second book Sons of the Conquerors as well. The distributor of their French-lanugage edition…
Hugh Pope 