Mark Bowden

His book Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War, is an international bestseller, which spent more than a year on The New York Times bestseller list (a month at number one), and was a finalist for the National Book Award. A story of the bloody 1993 battle American soldiers fought in Mogadishu, Somalia, it inspired the acclaimed feature film by director Ridley Scott. In his extraordinary new book, Guests of the Ayatollah : The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam, Bowden notes the Iranian hostage crisis was America's first showdown with Islamic fundamentalism. Bowden spent five years reconstructing the incident, re-creating it through the eyes of the terrified hostages and their radical, naïve captors. In Guests of the Ayatollah, he takes us into Oval Office consultations, exposes the startling truth behind October Surprise rumors, and tracks the fragile clandestine negotiations that led to the prisoner releases.

He is also the author of the international bestseller Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw, which tells the story of the hunt for Colombian cocaine billionaire Pablo Escobar. Killing Pablo won the Overseas Press Club’s Cornelius Ryan Award as the best book of 2001, and is currently being adapted for film. Bowden wrote the original screenplay for both films. He is also the author of Doctor Dealer, Bringing the Heat, Our Finest Day and Finders Keepers, which was published by The Atlantic Monthly Press in October, 2002. All six books are in print.

Bowden contributes to The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, writes a weekly column for The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was a staff writer for 22 years, and is an adjunct professor at Loyola College of Maryland, where he teaches creative writing and journalism. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1951, and grew up in Glen Ellyn, Ill., Port Washington, N.Y. and Timonium, Md. He was graduated from Loyola College of Maryland in 1973 with a B.A. in English Literature. From that year until 1979 he wrote for the now defunct Baltimore News-American.

Bowden lives in southeastern Pennsylvania. He is married and has five children.