Ben Rawlence is a British writer[1] who has written three books: “The Treeline: the last forest and the future of life on earth” (2022) Radio Congo: Signals of Hope From Africa's Deadliest War (2012) and City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp (2016).
Rawlence has also written for The New York Times, The Guardian and London Review of Books.
In 2010, whilst working for Human Rights Watch, Rawlence visited the refugee camp complex of Dadaab on the eastern Kenyan border with Somalia, then home to around 300,000 people.
[3][10][11][12] His resulting book, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp (2016), alternates between portraits of these residents and "big-picture accounts of the regional turmoil that drove them there ... and continues to shape their lives".
The book received positive reviews in the Los Angeles Times,[3] The Economist,[13] and by one reviewer in The New York Times,[10] His latest book is about the Arctic frontier of the boreal forest, The Treeline, to be published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and St. Martin's Press in the USA, in 2021.