About Sebastian Junger 

Junger engages audiences with a powerful, emotionally compelling and vivid portrait of the impact of war. He draws significant parallels between the battlefield and corporate America, providing important lessons that offer companies a tangible edge over their competition. A witness to some of the most heroic, disturbing and life-affirming events that represent the conflicted nature of war, Junger explores the emotional experience of combat and the impact of war on our everyday lives. Audiences will be riveted by Junger’s harrowing accounts of war and thoroughly motivated by his prolific metaphors that instill teamwork, crush the competition and earn respect.

Sebastian Junger is the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of WAR, The Perfect Storm, A Death in Belmont and Fire. He is also the acclaimed director of the documentary films Restrepo and Korengal. As a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and as a contributor to ABC News, he has covered major international news stories and has been awarded the National Magazine Award and a SAIS Novartis Prize for Journalism.

Junger’s latest book, In My Time Of Dying, is part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery. For years as an award-winning war reporter, Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day and was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived. This experience spurred Junger — a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical — to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die. How do we begin to process the brutal fact that any of us might perish unexpectedly on what begins as an ordinary day? How do we grapple with phenomena that science may be unable to explain? And what happens to a person, emotionally and spiritually, when forced to reckon with such existential questions? In My Time Of Dying debuted May 21, 2024.

Junger’s previous book, Freedom, was released in May 2021. In it, he weaves his account of a journey undertaken with three friends walking along the railroad lines of the East Coast together with tales of primatology and boxing strategy, the history of labor strikes and apache renegades, the role of women in resistance movements, and the brutal reality of life on the Pennsylvania frontier. Written in exquisite, razor-sharp prose, the result is a powerful examination of the primary desire that defines us.

Junger’s book entitled Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, takes readers on an investigation of the experiences of veterans and proposes that a major cause of pain is not being at war but coming home. We all have a strong instinct to belong to small groups defined by clear purpose and understanding -“tribes.” In Tribe, Junger demonstrates how this tribal connection has been largely lost in modern society. He examines PTSD as a side effect of soldiers leaving the close bonds they’ve formed in their military platoons and returning to a disconnected modern society and argues that regaining a sense of closeness may be the key to our psychological survival.

Junger’s critically acclaimed documentary Restrepo, co-directed with photojournalist Tim Hetherington, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary and received the 2010 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Restrepo documents the war in Afghanistan by reporting from soldiers’ perspectives. Its massive success inspired Junger to produce Korengal , which highlights the psychological effects soldiers must overcome during deployment and the emotions they are afflicted with when returning home.

In Spring 2017, Junger’s latest documentary feature, entitled Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Culled from nearly 1,000 hours of stunningly visceral footage, the film explores some of the horrific conditions that refugees commonly flee from, and show their humanity and courage in the face of physical threats as well as a largely hostile political environment. Junger captures the Syrian war’s harrowing carnage and socio-political consequences while painting an alarming picture of the West’s role in the creation of ISIS.

As an award-winning journalist reporting on the war from the soldiers’ perspective, Junger and photojournalist Tim Hetherington spent weeks at a time at a remote outpost that saw more combat than almost anywhere else in the country. This resulted in his best-seller WAR, as well as Restrepo. Hetherington was later killed while covering the war in Libya. Following his untimely death, Junger returned to Park City, Utah to debut the film, Which Way is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington, with high commendations at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Junger created this film in honor of Hetherington’s original vision to capture stories that would broaden viewers’ perceptions of war, and serve as a remembrance for his humanity and courage. Realizing the dangerous risks frequently taken by freelance photographers and reporters, Junger was motivated to start Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC), an organization that provides medical training for journalists in war zones, to commemorate the death of the acclaimed photographer. “Tim wanted to change the world,” Junger recalls, “But he also wanted the world to change him” (New York Times).

Junger became a fixture in the international media when, as a first-time author, he commanded the New York Times best-seller list for more than three years with The Perfect Storm, which became a major motion picture starring George Clooney.

His reporting on Afghanistan in 2000, profiling Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, became the subject of the National Geographic documentary Into the Forbidden Zone. In 2001, his expertise and experience reporting in Afghanistan led him to cover the war as a special correspondent for ABC News and Vanity Fair. His work has also been published in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, and Men’s Journal. He has reported on the LURD besiegement of Monrovia in Liberia, human rights abuses in Sierra Leone, war crimes in Kosovo, the peacekeeping mission in Cyprus, wildfire in the American West, guerilla war in Afghanistan, and hostage-taking in Kashmir. He has worked as a freelance radio correspondent during the war in Bosnia.

Junger is a native New Englander and a graduate of Wesleyan University. Attracted since childhood to “extreme situations and people at the edges of things,” Junger worked as a high-climber for tree removal companies. After a chainsaw injury, he decided to focus on journalism, primarily writing about people with dangerous jobs, from fire-fighting to commercial fishing (which led, of course, to The Perfect Storm).

In 1998, Junger established The Perfect Storm Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides educational opportunities for children of people in the maritime professions.

Junger has testified before Congress regarding veterans’ affairs on numerous occasions.

Moderated by Jarod Bowen

Jared Bowen is the host of The Culture Show, a daily radio program and podcast on 89.7 GBH. He is also the Emmy award-winning Executive Arts Editor at GBH exploring the creative process through a lively mix of local and national artist profiles, performances and exhibitions. Jared is a special correspondent for the PBS NewsHour and covers the latest happenings in the region’s theater, art, music, dance and film scenes on GBH’s Morning Edition and Boston Public Radio. He is the moderator of the Boston Speakers Series at Symphony Hall conducting interviews with figures ranging from world leaders to Nobel laureates to Oscar-winning actors. He is a member of the Boston Theater Critics Association and serves on the Board of Directors of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

He has won multiple Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Awards for his arts reporting and is a recipient of the Commonwealth Award, recognizing achievement in the arts, humanities and sciences. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society and a member of the American Antiquarian Society. Jared began his career at Dateline NBC in New York, is a graduate of Emerson College and holds an honorary doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.