Matt Beynon Rees Biography
Journalist and author Matt Beynon Rees was born in Wales in 1967 and studied at
Oxford University and the University of Maryland. He then worked as a financial
reporter in London, Washington D.C. and New York before becoming the first
Middle East correspondent for The Scotsman in 1996. He speaks
fluent Arabic and lives in Jerusalem.
As a journalist, he has covered the Middle East for over a decade, with the vast
majority of that time spent amongst Palestinians and Israelis. He's a
Contributor for Time based in Jerusalem, where he was the magazine's
bureau chief from June 2000 until January 2006. In 2004 he published a
nonfiction account of the divisions within Israeli and Palestinian societies
called Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East.
His first detective novel, The Collaborator of Bethlehem, the first in a
planned series of seven, was published in the U.S. in February 2007. The
series has been sold to leading publishers in France, Italy, Britain, Poland,
Spain, Germany, Israel, Portugal, and Brazil.
He has wanted to be a writer since he was nine years old and his schoolteacher
pinned a story he wrote on the classroom wall.
The first mystery he ever read was
The Maltese Falcon; he says, "Hammett inspired me to take not just the
character but the whole social context of the story. Having been a journalist
[in Jerusalem] for the past 10 years, I don't have to wonder what Palestinians
are like."
He is described as a dogged reporter, wide reader, old movie buff, and fitness enthusiast.
Bibliography:
Nonfiction
Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East (2004)
Omar Yussef novels
The Collaborator of Bethlehem (2007)
A Grave in Gaza (2008)
The Samaritan's Secret (2009)
The Fourth Assassin (2010)
Historical novels
Mozart's Last Aria (2011)
This biography was last updated on 08/02/2011.
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