Jean Hatzfeld

French reporter, war correspondent, and author. He was a correspondent for the periodical Liberation for many years. He described the Solidarity uprising in Poland, and the fall of the Berlin wall and the Ceauescu regime. He spent three years in the former Yugoslavia, and was wounded in a firefight in Sarajevo. In 1994 he went to Rwanda. He has published three books dedicated to the civil war in Rwanda. His book The Antelope Strategy (2009) generated tremendous interest in Poland and around the world, and for which he received many awards including the Prix Medici (2007) and the Ryszard Kapuściński Award (2010). It is Hatzfeld’s third book on the Rwandan civil war, during which, in 1994, over a million members of the Rwandan minority – the Tutsis – died at the hands of the majority Hutus. Hatzfeld returned to Rwanda to speak once again to representatives of both sides, as some of the Hutus were released from prison or returned from exile in the Congo; he gives voice to both killers and victims. “Hatzfelds’s book aches like an open wound. Because it is about an open wound. We don’t know if it can ever be healed […]. Don’t be afraid. The book will shock, but it won’t kill,” wrote Wojciech Tochmann about The Antelope Strategy. The publishing house Wydawnictwo Czarne has announced the 2011 publication of Polish editions of his next books, Dans le nu de la vie: recits des marais rwandais (Life Laid Bare: He Survivors in Rwanda Speak, February), and Une saison de machetes (A Time for Machetes, August). The author of The Antelope Strategy took part in the meeting Geografia przemocy (Geography of Violence) along with Sven Lindquist – author of Exterminate All the Brutes.