Deborah Amos
Deborah Amos covers the Middle East for NPR News. Her reports can be heard on NPR's award-winning Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition.
In 2009, Amos won the Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting from Georgetown University and in 2010 was awarded the Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award by Washington State University. Amos was part of a team of reporters who won a 2004 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of Iraq. A Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1991-1992, Amos returned to Harvard in 2010 as a Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School.
In 2003, Amos returned to NPR after a decade in television news, including ABC's Nightline and World News Tonight, and the PBS programs NOW with Bill Moyers and Frontline.
When Amos first came to NPR in 1977, she worked first as a director and then a producer for Weekend All Things Considered until 1979. For the next six years, she worked on radio documentaries, which won her several significant honors. In 1982, Amos received the Prix Italia, the Ohio State Award, and a DuPont-Columbia Award for "Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown," and in 1984 she received a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for "Refugees."
From 1985 until 1993, Amos spend most of her time at NPR reporting overseas, including as the London Bureau Chief and as an NPR foreign correspondent based in Amman, Jordan. During that time, Amos won several awards, including a duPont-Columbia Award and a Breakthru Award, and widespread recognition for her coverage of the Gulf War in 1991.
A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Amos is also the author of Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East (Public Affairs, 2010) and Lines in the Sand: Desert Storm and the Remaking of the Arab World (Simon and Schuster, 1992).
Amos is a Ferris Professor at Princeton, where she teaches journalism during the fall term.
Amos began her career after receiving a degree in broadcasting from the University of Florida at Gainesville.
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A simple piece that composer Malek Jandali wrote in 2011 became inextricable from the early protests in Syria. For a decade now, that connection has informed and invigorated his life and work. -
Welcome To The New World begins in 2016 when the Aldabaans arrive on election day — and wake up in Donald Trump's America. Author Jake Halpern began to document the newcomers in a comic strip. -
In classrooms and at home, kids are reading a new genre of books about a timely topic: refugees. They're selling well and providing a sympathetic view of people often portrayed as threats.
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Deborah Campbell's A Disappearance in Damascus is both a taut detective story and an intimate account of friendship during war — and that's before our reviewer discovered her own part in the story.
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Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, about 4 million Iraqis have fled their homes. Another 2 million have fled the country entirely. Throughout the war, NPR's Deborah Amos has spent much of her time with Iraqis who fled to Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. She has a new book out: Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile and Upheaval in the Middle East.
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During the holy month of Ramadan, millions of Muslims will gather nightly to feast with their family and friends. That also translates into the biggest primetime viewing audience across the Arab world. One blockbuster TV special, Renegades, will send this message: Terrorists kill Muslims, too.
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Kingdom of Heaven portrays one of the most legendary of Middle Eastern heroes, Saladin. Moviegoers in the Middle East will be watching Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud closely, to be sure he gets the character of Saladin just right.
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A new play about Iraq is drawing strong reviews in New York. Nine Parts of Desire is a solo performance by Iraqi-American actor Heather Raffo, who gives voice to nine different Iraqi women. NPR's Deborah Amos reports.
