Each week, the ACG hosts a discussion with a journalist based in Germany on the topics making the headlines and shaping political discourse in Berlin.
Join us on Monday, October 11 at 9:00 am EDT, for a discussion about German politics with former NPR international correspondent Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, who now hosts the podcast “Common Ground.”
Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson is the host of the podcast Common Ground and is based in Berlin. Prior to this, she served as Special Correspondent for NPR. Her reports can be heard on NPR’s award-winning programs, including Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and read at NPR.org. From 2012 until 2018, she was NPR’s bureau chief in Berlin. She won the ICFJ 2017 Excellence in International Reporting Award for her work in Central and Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Afghanistan.
She was also based in Cairo for NPR and covered the Arab World from the Middle East to North Africa during the Arab Spring. In 2006, she opened NPR’s first bureau in Kabul, from where she provided listeners with an in-depth sense of life inside Afghanistan, from the increase in suicide among women in a country that treats them as second-class citizens to the growing interference of Iran and Pakistan in Afghan affairs. For her coverage of Afghanistan, she won a Peabody Award, Overseas Press Club Award, and the Gracie in 2010. She received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award from Colby College in 2011 for her coverage in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Ms. Nelson spent 20 years as a newspaper reporter, including as Knight Ridder’s Middle East Bureau Chief. While at the Los Angeles Times, she was sent on extended assignment to Iran and Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. She spent three years as an editor and reporter for Newsday and was part of the team that won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for covering the crash of TWA Flight 800.
A graduate of the University of Maryland, Nelson speaks Farsi, Dari, and German.