Olivier Weber

In May 2009, he presented the Joseph-Kessel Prize to the writer and member of the Académie française Érik Orsenna for his fight for water and his latest book.

Olivier Weber was nominated in 2008 to be ambassador of France at large, in charge of human trafficking and human rights. He has done several dozens of missions for this task in Asia, Africa, Central America, Middle East, and advocates at the tribune of the United Nations mainly on human trafficking, child soldiers, fight against drugs, civil society and human rights.

After winning the award Joseph-Kessel Prize, he was nominated president of the prize in 2001.

In August 2001, he traveled to Central Asia to launch a humanitarian mission in the Panjshir Valley and bring to Ahmad Shah Massoud proofs of his book The Afghan Hawk. A few days later, 9 September 2001, two days before the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Lion of Panjshir was assassinated by two terrorists of Al-Qaeda. Olivier Weber was to attend his funeral, when the Taliban launched a major offensive. His testimony and his denunciation of the Taliban regime and the rise of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia have earned him death threats. He has published several books on Central Asia and the Silk Road: The Great Feast of the East, The Afghan Hawk: a journey to the land of the Taliban, Memory Murdered, Road of Drugs, The White Death.

He is a lecturer (maître de conférences) at the Institute of Political Studies of Paris (Institut d'études politiques de Paris or Sciences-Po), where he teaches the guerrilla warfare. He has completed from 1983 to 2011 more than 20 terrain-researches as a war observer in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Algeria, Syria, Erytrea, Sudan, Iran, Sri Lanka, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan.

Olivier Weber (born 1958) is an award-winning French writer, novelist and reporter at large, known primarily for his coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has been a war correspondent for twenty-five years, especially in Central Asia, Africa, Middle-East and Iraq. He is an assistant professor at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris, president of the Prize Joseph Kessel and today ambassador of France at large. Weber has won several national and international awards of literature and journalism, in particular for his stories on Afghanistan and for his books on wars. His novels, travels writing books and essays have been translated in a dozen of languages.

Weber, born in 1958 in Montluçon, studied economics and anthropology at the University of San Francisco, University of Paris Sorbonne, University of Nice (PhD) and at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, INALCO). He won the Albert Londres Prize and Joseph Kessel Prize for his reports on wars and books.