Born in Baghdad, Kanan Makiya is the author of Republic of Fear, Post-Islamic Classicism, The Monument, and Cruelty and Silence, which was awarded the 1993 Lionel Gelber Prize fro the best book on international relations. He has written for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Independent, The Times (London), and The Times Literary Supplement. A trained architect, he is a founding director of The Iraq Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that facilitates research toward a democratic Iraq. He has collaborated on two films for television, one of which, Saddam's Killing Fields, received the 1992 Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Television Documentary on Foreign Affairs. Makiya currently directs the Iraq Research and Documentation Project at Harvard University and teaches at Brandeis University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.