Ian Urbina, "The Outlaw Ocean"

Ian Urbina discusses his book, "The Outlaw Ocean", at Politics and Prose.

A Pulitzer and Polk Award-winning investigative journalist, Urbina builds on his New York Times series for a gripping first-hand look at the high seas. Sprawling and difficult to regulate, the oceans teem with pirates, traffickers, and poachers as well as vigilante conservationists and floating abortion providers. Even legal enterprises, such as the fishing, oil, and shipping industries, are often rife with exploitation and abuse. In writing that’s by turns harrowing, suspenseful, and funny, Urbina exposes the true conditions mariners endure, chronicles a near-mutiny aboard a police ship, joins a maritime repo-man, and synthesizes his wide-ranging experiences into a revelatory profile of the global economy.

IAN URBINA is an investigative reporter for The New York Times. He has won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News and a George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting. Several of his stories have been developed into major feature films and one was nominated for an Emmy Award. He has degrees in history and cultural anthropology from Georgetown University and the University of Chicago. Before joining the Times, he was a Fulbright Fellow in Cuba and he also wrote about the Middle East and Africa for various outlets including the Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, and Harper's Magazine. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his family.

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Produced by Tom Warren