Ethan Casey, author of Alive and Well in Pakistan (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010), in the Hoh rainforest, Washington State, USA, December 2009.

Ethan Casey is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), which Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban and Descent into Chaos, has called “magnificent,” Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid calls “the insights of a singular, clear-eyed and humane traveler,” and Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat describes as “wonderful … a model of travel writing.”

Ethan is a frequent speaker on Pakistan, at venues ranging from the Royal Geographical Society and the Pakistan High Commission in London, to major U.S. and Canadian universities, to World Affairs Councils from Anchorage to Pittsburgh, to religious congregations and living rooms in and near Seattle, where he lives. He uses his position as an American traveler and author with 15 years’ exposure to Pakistan to help foster historical and geographical perspective, human connections, and conversation between Americans and Pakistanis.

He blogs regularly at www.aliveandwellinpakistan.com, writes a fortnightly column for the Books & Authors section of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, and is writing a new book on Pakistan to be published in 2010. The new book will cover the action-packed five years since the publication of Alive and Well in Pakistan and will narrate a six-week trip he made with photographer Pete Sabo in early 2009, entirely overland from Mumbai on the coast of India to Karachi in Pakistan. It can be pre-ordered online.

Ethan fell into journalism the same way his role model, the late Observer foreign correspondent and travel writer Gavin Young, did: “the way a drunken man falls into a pond.” His first discovery of the world outside the United States, a trip to Haiti at age 16, spurred him to spend an academic year on the University of Wisconsin College Year in Nepal Program and later to move to Bangkok. He interviewed Aung San Suu Kyi in April 1996, during her brief period out of house arrest; was an eyewitness to the July 1997 coup d’etat in Cambodia; interviewed Megawati Sukarnoputri (later President of Indonesia) in December 1996, during the last period of Suharto’s rule; interviewed Corazon Aquino on the 10th anniversary of the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos; was in Kathmandu in July 1994 for the fall of the first elected government of Nepal after the 1990 anti-royalist revolution and covered the November 1994 elections; and lived through the collapse of the Thai baht and other Asian currencies.

In 1994 he began covering the subcontinent, traveling around India by train and spending several extended periods in Jammu & Kashmir State near the height of the separatist rebellion there. His interest in Kashmir and in the subcontinent’s Muslims led him to visit Pakistan for the first time in 1995. He visited the Line of Control during the 1999 Kargil crisis and, in 2003, accepted an invitation to spend a semester as a founding faculty member of the School of Media and Communication at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore.

Based in London from 1998 until 2005, he covered crises in Zimbabwe and Haiti and edited several book-length article collections, notably 09/11 8:48 a.m.: Documenting America’s Greatest Tragedy (in collaboration with Jay Rosen and the New York University Department of Journalism), published at the end of September 2001. John Sutherland in The Guardian called 09/11 8:48 a.m. “choral … subjected to stringent editing … more complete (because truer to the event) than if it arrived next Easter.” From 1999 to 2005 he published the online journal and discussion forum Blue Ear, which James Fallows praised as “ambitious” and “innovative”.

Periodicals he has written for include The Globe and Mail, the South China Morning Post, the Boston Globe, The Guardian, the Financial Times, Geographical magazine, and the Observer News Service. He now works independently on book, film, and digital publishing projects and as a book editor, and is pursuing a graduate degree in South Asian Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Ethan Casey is also co-author, with Michael Betzold, of Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1991), and is planning a book on Haiti and Haitian communities in North America.