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 among 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)
A Name in Blood (2012)
The Ambassador (2015)
Dominic Verrazzano novels
The Damascus (2016)
Matt Beynon Rees's website
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