Matthieu Aikins
Matthieu Aikins is a Canadian journalist living in Kabul, Afghanistan, best known for his reporting on the war in Afghanistan. He is a contributing writer for "The New York Times Magazine" and a contributing editor at "Rolling Stone", as well as a Puffin Foundation Fellow at the Type Media Center. He has also been a fellow at New America, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy in Berlin. He is a recipient of the George Polk Award, a finalist for the National Magazine Awards, and his writing has appeared in the anthology "The Best American Magazine  Writing 2012". Early life and education. Aikins grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada, and graduated from Queen's University at Kingston in 2006. Afterwards, he spent several years traveling North America and Eastern Europe. During that period, he contributed to Canadian newspapers and alt-weeklies. One of his articles, "Adam's Fall", about suicides from the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge in Halifax, Nova Scotia, won two major prizes; in 2009, the Halifax-Dartmouth Bridge Commission decided to build suicide-prevention barriers. Journalism career. In 2008, Aikins traveled overland from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan, where he began his career reporting from the  region. His half-Asian features and command of Persian allowed him to blend in as an Afghan, and Aikins began filing stories while traveling in local transportation and sleeping in roadside tea houses. He wrote several breakthrough articles in 2009, including "Unembedded in Afghanistan" for "The Coast", which led to his second Canadian Association of Journalists prize in two years, after his first for "Adam's Fall". He also wrote a story for "Harper's Magazine", "The Master of Spin Boldak", which exposed drug trafficking by the Afghan Border Police in the town of Spin Boldak in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The  article was later used to train U.S. military intelligence analysts on the region's history. In 2010, he won a Canadian National Magazine Award for his story "Last Stand in Kandahar", published in "The Walrus", which led to a National Magazine Award in Canada for "Best New Creative Talent". His 2011 article "Our Man in Kandahar", which exposed a massacre by the Afghan Border Force commander, Brigadier General Abdul Raziq, was a finalist in the reporting category for the National Magazine Awards. Aikins has been an outspoken critic of human rights abuses by U.S. allies in Afghanistan. In 2012, he  received a master's degree from New York University in Near East Studies. In 2013, he published an article called "The A-Team Killings" in "Rolling Stone", which investigated allegations of war crimes against a U.S. Army Special Forces unit in Wardak Province, Afghanistan, received the 2013 George Polk Award for magazine reporting, and the 2014 Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism. His 2014 article "Whoever Saves a Life" in "Matter" about first responders in Syria won him a slew of awards, including the Livingston Award and the Overseas Press Club. In 2016, he joined a friend and former translator  for the United States on the "smuggler's road" to Europe, which is also a testament to the European migrant crisis. The book based on that experience, "The Naked Don't Fear the Water", will be published in February 2022. In 2019, he was announced as the Edward R. Murrow press fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations.