Simon Akam

Simon Akam (2017) (www.simonakam.com) is a British writer, educated at Oxford University and on a Fulbright Scholarship to Columbia Journalism School. He worked at the New York Times in New York, for Reuters and the Economist in West Africa and for Newsweek in London. Following an auction involving five major London publishers, he signed a contract with William Heinemann, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK, to write his first book in 2015. “The Changing of the Guard” is a narrative nonfiction account of the impact of the Iraq and Afghan wars on the British Army. It uses the evolution of the archetypal British institution to tell a broader story of post-colonial Britain’s attempt to negotiate its place in the world, the endurance of the British class system and shifting Anglo-American relations. Akam, who spent a year in the British Army in 2003-4 on a program called a Gap Year Commission, is working on the book project as a visiting fellow at the Changing Character of War program (www.ccw.ox.ac.uk) at Oxford University.