democracy discourse fellow
Patricia Evangelista
Patricia Evangelista is a trauma journalist and former investigative reporter for the Philippine news company Rappler. Her reporting on armed conflict and the aftermath of Super Typhoon Haiyan was awarded the Kate Webb Prize for exceptional journalism in dangerous conditions. She was a Headlands Artist in Residence, a recipient of the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, and a fellow of the Logan Nonfiction Program, the Marshall McLuhan Fellowship, the De La Salle University Democracy Discourse Series, the New America Fellows Program, Civitella Ranieri, and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. Her work investigating President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war has earned a number of local and international accolades. She lives in Manila.
Country
Philippines
Categories
Literary Journalism
Drug War
Some People Need Killing
Internationally renowned trauma journalist Patricia Evangelista’s debut book, SOME PEOPLE NEED KILLING: A Memoir of Murder in My Country(Random House), is a powerful, on-the-ground account of a nation careening into a violent autocracy told through the harrowing stories of the Philippines’ state-sanctioned killings of its citizens. Evangelista’s work is a profound act of witness and tour de force of literary journalism.
Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that forged a new future for the Philippines. Three decades later, in the face of mounting inequality, the nation discovered the fragility of its democratic institutions under the regime of strongman Rodrigo Duterte.
Some People Need Killing is Evangelista’s meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle of the Philippines’ drug war and Duterte’s assault on the country’s struggling democracy. For six years, Evangelista had the distinctive beat of chronicling the killings carried out by police and vigilantes in the name of Duterte’s war on drugs – a war that has led to the slaughter of thousands – immersing herself in the world of killers and survivors and capturing the atmosphere of fear created when an elected president decides that some lives are worth less than others.
Reviews for Some People Need Killing
“Patricia Evangelista exposes the evil in her country with perfect clarity fueled by profound rage, her voice at one utterly beautiful and terrifyingly vulnerable. In short, clear sentences packed with faithfully recorded details, she reveals the nature of unbridled cruelty with a relentless insightfulness that I have not encountered since the work of Hannah Arendt. This is an account of a dark chapter in the Philippines, an examination of how murder was conflated with salvation in a violent society. Ultimately, however, it transcends its ostensible subject and becomes a meditation on the disabling pathos of self-delusion, a study of manipulation and corruption as they occur in conflict after conflict across the world. Few of history’s grimmest chapters have had the fortune to be narrated by such a withering, ironic, witty, devastatingly brilliant observer. You may think you are inured to shock, but this book is an exploding bomb that will damage you anew, making you wiser as it does so.”
– Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of Far and Away
“In this haunting work of memoir and reportage, Patricia Evangelista both describes the origins of autocratic rule in the Philippines and explains its universal significance. The cynicism of voters; the opportunism of Filipino politicians; the appeal of brutality and violence to both groups; all of this will be familiar to readers, wherever they are from.”
–Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
“Tragic, elegant, vital. She risked her life to tell this story.”
–Tara Westover, New York Times bestselling author of Educated
