James Fergusson

James Fergusson is a freelance journalist and foreign correspondent who has written for many publications including the London Times and the Economist. From 1997 he reported from Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan, covering that city's fall to the Taliban. In 1998 he became the first western journalist in more than two years to interview the fugitive warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. From 1999 to 2001 he worked in Sarajevo as a press spokesman for OHR, the organisation charged with implementing the Dayton, Ohio peace accord that ended Bosnia's savage civil war in 1995. His first book, Kandahar Cockney, told the story of Mir, his Pashtun fixer-interpreter whom he befriended and helped gain political asylum in London. His third book, A Million Bullets, documented the start of the Nato campaign in Helmand in southern Afghanistan, and was the British Army's Military Book of the Year (2009). His latest, Taliban, has already been translated into four languages. He is currently working on a book about the Horn of Africa and the international security threat that region represents. He lives in Edinburgh and is married with three children.