AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST’S ADVENTURES IN THE OLDEST CITY ON EARTH
This is a supremely engaging memoir by a young American reporter that chronicles the life-changing year she spent as a journalist in Yemen. In the spring of 2006, Jennifer Steil was working as a senior editor at The Week in New York when she was invited to teach a three-week course to aspiring journalists at the Yemen Observer, the country’s English-language newspaper. As soon as she arrived in Sana’a, she fell headlong into an incredibly foreign culture whose beliefs perplexed and sometimes frightened her. She also faced a staff of amateur Yemeni journalists who were eager for real training.
Drawing on reserves she didn’t know she had, Steil rose to the challenge, transforming from a terrified, guarded outsider into an informed, sympathetic insider with a deepening respect for the ancient traditions she was encountering. When her fledgling reporters begged her to stay on she accepted and stayed in Yemen for a year, seeing the paper through a number of international crises. But she could not think of returning to her conventional life in New York. Destiny intervened. In her last weeks in Yemen she met the British ambassador and they fell in love. Steil has been in Yemen ever since, keeping up with her former reporters, living in the ambassador’s residence, and writing this book. They are engaged to be married.
Before moving to Yemen, Steil was a senior editor at the news magazine The Week.
Rights sold to: Bruna (Holland); Goldmann (Germany); and HarperCollins (Australia).