In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin

The devastating biography of Marie Colvin, the foremost war reporter of her generation, who was killed in Syria in 2012

When Marie Colvin was killed by an IED in Homs, Syria, in 2012, at age fifty-six, the world lost one of its most fearless, accomplished, and iconoclastic war correspondents, an eye-patch wearing, party-throwing, and risk-taking female combat reporter who covered the most significant and destructive global calamities of her lifetime. In Extremis: The Life and Death of War Reporter Marie Colvin, written by Colvin’s friend and prizewinning fellow reporter Lindsey Hilsum, is a thrilling and powerful investigation into Colvin’s epic life and tragic death.

After growing up in a middle-class Catholic family on Long Island, Colvin got her start working for The Sunday Times, where she was driven with reckless abandon to tell the stories of the victims of the major conflicts of our time. She lost an eye reporting in Sri Lanka at the end of their civil war, interviewed Gaddafi twice, and risked her life covering conflict in Chechnya, East Timor, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe. Unsurprisingly, her personal life was as unpredictable as her professional: bold, driven, and complex, she was married multiple times, had many lovers, drank heavily, suffered from PTSD, and refused to be bound by society’s expectations for women.

With exclusive access to Colvin’s intimate diaries from age thirteen to her death in 2012, interviews with people from every corner of Colvin’s extraordinary life, and expert research worthy of Colvin herself, Lindsey Hilsum’s In Extremis is a timely and propulsive biography of the foremost war correspondent of her generation.