Masha Hamilton

Residence : New York, NY

Biographical information

Masha Hamilton spent nearly a decade overseas as a journalist, first for The Associated Press based in Israel, where she helped run a 12-person news bureau, as well as covering the start of the first intefadeh, Israel's partial withdrawal from Lebanon, the Demjanjuk trial and many other events. She conducted one-on-one interviews with Arik Sharon, Yitzhak Rabin and Yitzhak Shamir, among others. On assignments in Egypt, Lebanon, Finland and the Soviet Union, Hamilton wrote stories on refuseniks and Kremlin politics under Gorbachev. After five years, she moved to the Soviet Union as Moscow correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. While in Moscow, she also reported for NBC-Mutual Radio and wrote a column for U.S. newspapers called "Postcard from Moscow," covering the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of Yeltsin, independence movements in Soviet republics and the societal earthquake of the period.

Hamilton returned to the United States determined to find a deeper truth through fiction. Staircase of a Thousand Steps, set in the Middle East, was published in 2001 by a Penguin Putnam imprint and was acclaimed by critics. It was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection as well as an American Booksellers' Association Booksense choice. It has been read by book groups in the United States and overseas, and taught in international literature classes at several colleges and universities.

Her second novel, The Distance Between Us, is to be published in the fall of 2004. She revisited Israel and the West Bank at the start of the second intefadeh to research that novel, also set in the Middle East, about the effects of journalists' driving need to see, or as the Old Testament puts it, the lust of the eye. The manuscript won an Arizona literary grant.

Masha traveled to Afghanistan in the spring of 2004 and wrote for the Miami Herald as well as others about the country's efforst at reconstruction. She lives in New York City with her husband and three children.

Masha has spoken at a number of universities in New York, the Midwest and Arizona, as well as to the Society of Southwestern Authors, the Harvard Club (Arizona branch), and book groups in the U.S., Canada and Israel. She has also read in bookstores.

Discussion topics

• Women and War- based on her own experiences working in Israel during the first intefadeh and briefly at the start of the second intefadeh, as well as in Moscow during the civil unrest that accompanied the collapse of Communism, plus her research about the unique experiences of women covering war.
• Staircase of a Thousand Steps - a discussion of her novel set in the Middle East. After living in Israel as a foreign correspondent for five years, Masha returned to the U.S. to write Staircase. Critics said of the novel: "Hamilton writes with striking clarity, using words as carefully as the Bedouin use water to bring a disappearing world to vibrant life," (Kirkus, starred), "Hamilton is a graceful writer and terrific storyteller," (the Arizona Daily Sun), "I would not have missed reading it for anything," (The Seattle Press). Book groups across the U.S. and in Canada and Israel have read Staircase and Hamilton speaks to many of them in person or via speakerphone.
• The Distance Between Us - a discussion of her second novel, also set in the Middle East, and the focus on what it means to report on violence. The novel is published in November 2004. Critics have already called it "graceful, luminous, elegant, beguiling." "Discover Hamilton's gifted way with words. A winner," wrote Laurel Johnson of the Midwest Book Review.

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