Heroes

The 'heroes' of John Pilger's narrative are the many ordinary people he has witnessed coping with their lives in difficult and often brutal conditions: dissidents in the Soviet Union; victims of conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Africa, India, the Middle East and Central America. They also include the Irish labouring generation of his great-great-grandfather, transported in irons to Australia for uttering 'unlawful oaths'.

It is a vivid, engrossing and sometimes blackly amusing personal story covering the periods for which his journalism is renowned. John Pilger has witnessed many of the major world upheavals of the past thirty years, as well as the daily realities of injustices normally hidden from society's view, and his reporting of these events has always been distinguished by his compassion for the ordinary people caught up in them, and the intense desire to tell the truth.

About the Author

John Pilger grew up in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, author and film-maker. He has twice won British journalism's highest award, that of Journalist of the Year, for his work all over the world, notably in Cambodia and Vietnam. He has been International Reporter of the Year and winner of the United Nations Associated Peace Prize and Gold Medal. For his broadcasting, he has won France's Reporter Sans Frontières, an American television Academy Award, an Emmy, and the Richard Dimbleby Award, given by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. In 2003, he received the Sophie Prize for 'thirty years of exposing deception and improving human rights'.