Stringer is an account of a year and a half that Sundaram spent in the country working for the Associated Press. It was an intense period that would take him deep into the shadowy city of Kinshasa, the dense rainforests that still evoke Conrad's vision, and the heart of Africa's great war, culminating in the historic and violent multiparty elections of 2006. Along the way he would go on a joyride with Kinshasa's feral children, fend off its women desperate for an escape route, and travel with an Indian businessman hunting for his fortune.
Written with startling beauty and acuity, Stringer is a superb piece of reportage. It marks the debut of a breathtaking new talent.
Anjan Sundaram is the author of Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship and Stringer: A Reporter's Journey in the Congo. An award-winning journalist, he has reported from central Africa for the New York Times and the Associated Press. His writing has also appeared in Granta, The Guardian, Observer, Foreign Policy, Telegraph and The Washington Post. His war correspondence from the Central African Republic won a Frontline Club award in 2015, and his reporting on Pygmy tribes in Congo's rainforest won a Reuters prize in 2006. His work has also been shortlisted for the Prix Bayeux and the Kurt Schork award. Stringer was a Royal African Society Book of the Year in 2014. Anjan graduated from Yale University.