Congratulations to past de Groot Visiting Fellow at the American Library in Paris, Matthieu Aikins, on your second Pulitzer Prize, and for selling your next book, American Vigilantes!
Matthieu Aikins accepted the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting alongside colleagues Azam Ahmed and Christina Goldbaum, for their series in the New York Times exploring the root causes of the US defeat in Afghanistan. You can read about their work here.
From Publisher’s Marketplace: Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Matthieu Aikins’s AMERICAN VIGILANTES, on the rise of the Special Forces and how America’s longest war corrupted the US military, building on the author’s landmark New York Times Magazine feature and 17 years of reporting from Afghanistan and the Middle East, to Tom Mayer at Norton, at auction, by Chris Parris-Lamb at The Gernert Company (NA).
Matthieu Aikins is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and a journalist and author who has reported from Afghanistan and the Middle East since 2008. He is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a Puffin Fellow at Type Media Center. His first book, The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, about an undercover journey to Europe with Afghan refugees, was published by Harper and Fitzcarraldo Editions in February 2022, and has been translated into eight languages. In 2025, Aikins won the Pulitzer for Explanatory Reporting for a New York Times series on the causes of US defeat in Afghanistan. Aikins received the 2022 Pulitzer for International Reporting as part of a Times team that investigated civilian casualties from American airstrikes. The video investigation that he and his colleagues produced won two Emmy awards. He has also received the National Magazine, Polk, and Livingston awards. He is a past fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, New America, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy in Berlin, and his work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, and the anthology The Best American Magazine Writing. Matthieu grew up in Nova Scotia, and has a master’s degree in Near Eastern Studies from New York University.
Visit Matthieu’s website, www.maikins.com