Buckingham academic wins the Royal Society of Literature’s £10,000 Ondaatje Prize

Justin Marozzi, a Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Institute, has been announced as the 2015 winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize.

The award is given annually for a ‘a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place’. Mr Marozzi won the prize for his book, Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood.

Mr Marozzi teaches on the University’s MA in Military History by research. He has spent much of the past decade living and working in Iraq, with long assignments in Afghanistan, Darfur and Somalia. A trustee of the Royal Geographical Society, he is the author of three other books.

He said: “I am deeply honoured and completely thrilled to have been awarded the RSL’s Ondaatje Prize. Living and working in Baghdad – and writing about the city – have taken up much of the past decade during an extraordinary time in the history of a city that has surely known more violence than any other and yet which once was the capital of world civilisation.

“If there is one lesson to be learned from the turbulent history of Baghdad and the current turmoil of the Middle East, it is that tolerance and cosmopolitanism are the only hope.”