Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch (born 1961) is an author and journalist. He has written on a variety of subjects, particularly ethnic conflicts around the world, and is probably best known for his first book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, which tells the story of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.

Gourevitch was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania into a family. His parents and grandparents were European refugees from The Holocaust. Gourevitch spent most of his childhood in Middletown, Connecticut.

Gourevitch knew that he wanted to be a writer by the time he went to college. He attended Cornell University. He took a break for three years in order to concentrate fully on writing. He did eventually graduate in 1986. From 1989 to 1992 he attended a writing program at Columbia University and received a degree in fiction writing. While Gourevitch went on to publish some short fiction in literary magazines, most of Gourevitch's published writing has been nonfiction.

Gourevitch worked for the Jewish magazine The Forward from 1992 to 1997, first as New York bureau chief and then as cultural editor. Since 1997 he has been a writer for the New Yorker magazine. He has also written for many other magazines and newspapers.

Gourevitch became interested in Rwanda in 1994 as the Holocaust Memorial Museum was opening and he saw that its founders were determined that genocide should never happen again, while genocide had in fact just happened again and not enough was being written about it. Between 1995 and 1997, he took six trips to Rwanda, to experience the country for himself and conduct interviews. His book We Wish to Inform You... was published in 1998. The movie Hotel Rwanda is based on part of the book.

Gourevitch published a second book in 2001. Titled A Cold Case, it is about an unsolved murder in New York.

In 2004 Gourevitch was assigned to cover the U.S. Presidential election for the New Yorker. He was a strong supporter of John Kerry. Presently, he is the editor of The Paris Review.