Christie Blatchford, a columnist with The Globe and Mail, will talk about the men and women who serve in Afghanistan as part of Glendon College’s bp Nichol Reading Series.
Blatchford will read from Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army (Double Day, 2007) Wednesday, March 10, at 4:30pm at the BMO Conference Centre, Glendon Hall, Glendon campus. She won the 2008 Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction for Fifteen Days.
In 2006, Blatchford was embedded with the Canadian Forces in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, where she filed regular reports. She also interviewed dozens of returned members of the 1st Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, back at home. She won the respect and trust of the soldiers and they shared breathtakingly honest accounts of their desire to serve, willingness to confront fear and danger in the battlefield, loyalty towards each other and the heartbreak occasioned by the loss of one of their own.
Grounded in insights gained over the course of three trips to Afghanistan in 2006, and drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews not only with the servicemen and women, but with their commanders and family members as well, Fifteen Days is a detailed, complex and deeply affecting picture of military life in the 21st century.
Christie Blatchford has worked as a journalist for over 25 years with columns covering sports, lifestyle, current affairs and crime. She started working for The Globe and Mail in 1972 while still studying at Ryerson University and has since worked for the Toronto Star, the Toronto Sun and the National Post. She returned to The Globe and Mail in 2002. She was the 1999 winner of the National Newspaper Award for column writing.