| Amy Waldman | |
| Birth Date: | 21 May 1969 |
| Birth Place: | Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Notable Works: | The Submission |
| Occupation: | Journalist, Writer |
Amy Waldman (born May 21, 1969) is an American author and journalist. She was a reporter with The New York Times for a total of eight years. For three years she was co-chief of the South Asia bureau. Before that she covered Harlem, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the aftermath of 9/11.[1]
Her first novel, The Submission, was published in 2011. According to a review of the book in The Guardian, the novel tackles the fallout from 9/11 attacks.[2] The novel was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award in 2011. It lost out narrowly to Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies.[3]
Waldman was also a national correspondent with The Atlantic,[1] has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, is a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly, and won a Berlin Prize in 2010 from the American Academy in Berlin.[4]
Amy Waldman's first novel, The Submission, was published in 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and received mostly positive reviews. The plot revolves around events after the September 11 attacks when a Muslim architect wins a blind contest to design a Ground Zero Memorial.[5]
Some of the awards and honors received include:[6]
Waldman's second novel, A Door in the Earth, was published in 2019 by Little, Brown and Company. The novel focusses on a young college graduate who was born in Kabul and grew up in California. Inspired by the memoir by an American doctor who built a local women's clinic in rural Afghanistan, she decides to visit that same remote village to make use of her language skills and studies in anthropology in order to give further support to the project. While living with a local family she gradually realizes the falsehoods contained in the memoir while also coming to understand the power structures in the village and the influence of the U.S. Army on the region. Waldman depicts not only the people and customs of Afghanistan – which she herself experienced first-hand in 2001 as a journalist for the New York Times – but also the growing self-awareness of her protagonist against a backdrop of a village caught between Afghani resistance fighters and an American military unit determined to expand its influence over the region.
The library book review journal Kirkus Reviews described the novel as "A bone-chilling takedown of America's misguided use of soft power."[7] The reviewer for The New York Times pointed out problems in the narrative voice, but noted that "it's easy to overlook these flaws because the book's moral questions feel so urgent."[8]