Rory McCarthy is the Jerusalem correspondent for the Guardian. He was born in 1971 in London and studied history at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He has always worked as a journalist, starting on the Evening Argus in Brighton and then the Press Association news agency in Britain before moving abroad to become a foreign correspondent. He worked for three years with the international news agency Agence France-Presse in Hong Kong, Japan and Pakistan.

From Pakistan in 2000 he began writing for the Guardian, covering the Islamic world and the Middle East. In his four years in Pakistan he also wrote about the Taliban of Afghanistan and their fall. He was then posted to Iraq, where he lived for nearly two years after the US and British invasion as the paper’s Baghdad correspondent. From Baghdad he moved to Beirut where he took Arabic lessons, wrote a book
and covered stories across the Arab world. Now in Jerusalem he reports on Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Nobody Told Us We Are Defeated is his first book.