Quick answer
The closest match is In Extremis, Lindsey Hilsum’s biography of the war correspondent Marie Colvin, who was killed in Homs, Syria, in 2012. Next is It’s What I Do, Lynsey Addario’s memoir of photographing war, and for the oldest model of the form, Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War. Further down are two outsider accounts that sit in tension with Hankir’s insider voices.
8 books to read after Our Women on the Ground
In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie ColvinClosest match
Hilsum, International Editor of Channel 4 News, wrote the life of Marie Colvin, the American correspondent who reported for the Sunday Times and was killed in Homs, Syria, in 2012. It won the James Tait Black Prize for Biography. It covers several of the same conflicts as the anthology, Syria above all, and asks what the work costs the women who do it.
It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and WarClosest match
Addario, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, describes two decades photographing conflict, including Iraq and Afghanistan. In March 2011 she was one of four New York Times journalists held captive for six days in Libya. Like Amira Al-Sharif’s essay, it’s a woman photographer’s first-person account of working where the camera is treated as a man’s job.
The Unwomanly Face of War
Alexievich recorded the testimony of Soviet women who served in the Second World War as snipers, pilots, medics and soldiers. The manuscript was held up for two years, and she was accused of tarnishing the heroic image of Soviet women. She won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. The earlier model for a book built entirely from women’s own accounts of war.
The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria
Yazbek, a Syrian writer from an Alawite family, was forced into exile after joining the 2011 uprising. This book records her secret journeys back into northern Syria during the civil war, and won France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. The long form of what several essayists in the anthology describe: a Syrian woman reporting on her own country at personal risk.
Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women
Sunday Times foreign correspondent Christina Lamb investigates how women are targeted in modern war. It was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Orwell Prize. Like Our Women on the Ground, it puts women at the centre of conflict reporting, written by a correspondent who spent years in the field. Hard reading, and important.
The Face of War
A collection of Gellhorn’s war reporting, first published in 1959. Refused accreditation for D-Day like every other woman journalist, she stowed away on a hospital ship and went ashore in Normandy with a medical team. One of the first women to fight her way into frontline reporting, the same battle for access that runs through many of the essays.
Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women
Drawing on her years as a correspondent in the Middle East, Brooks profiles Muslim women, from Hezbollah workers to a Saudi businesswoman, and asks whether Islamic feminism is possible. Reviewers were divided on whether it challenges stereotypes or repeats them. Written by a Western outsider about the same region, it shows exactly the perspective an anthology of Arab women reporters answers.
The Bookseller of Kabul
Norwegian journalist Seierstad lived for three months with a Kabul bookseller’s family after the fall of the Taliban and wrote about the women of the household in a novelistic style. The bookseller’s wife sued for defamation; Seierstad lost in 2010 and was cleared on appeal in 2011. It raises the question under Hankir’s collection: who has the right to tell a family’s private story?
Frequently asked questions about books like Our Women on the Ground
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