author
Natalie Amiri
Natalie Amiri, born in 1978, is the child of a German mother and an Iranian father. She has a degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies from the Otto Friedrich University in Bamberg. After graduating, a German Academic Exchange Programme grant took her to the universities of Tehran and Damascus. She has presented ARD’s Weltspiegel since 2014. In 2015, she became head of ARD’s Tehran station, but in 2020 the German foreign ministry advised her not to return to Iran, for her own safety. She was named political journalist of the year by Medium Magazin in both 2022 and 2024, and has won numerous awards. She is the author of the bestselling books »Zwischen den Welten« (Between worlds, 2021) and »Afghanistan« (2022).
© Johannes Moths
Latest book
Der Nahost-Komplex. Von Menschen, Träumen und Zerstörung (The Middle East Complex. Of People, Dreams and Destruction)
Penguin
Natalie Amiri is known for her sober reporting from the Middle East. For her latest book, the award-winning author has travelled across the entire region. Here, she lets Gaza’s children speak, talks to the relatives of murdered Israeli hostages, meets Kurdish women in Kobani in Syria who are resisting the IS, and interviews Marwan Barghuthi, described as the Nelson Mandela of Palestinians, in an Israeli prison, and also talks to former UN chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte and Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer. In this book, she manages to do something that seems impossible these days: she negotiates different worlds, and awakens our sympathy for all sides.
A book that helps us understand where the Near and Middle East is headed with a massively weakened Iran, and which ultimately takes an uncompromising stance on one side—that of the people.
