Deborah Scroggins
The Inaugural Ridenhour Book Prize

Deborah Scroggins is the author of Emma’s War: An Aid Worker, Radical Islam, and the Politics of Oil – A True Story of Love and Death in the Sudan (Pantheon, 2002). It is both the riveting story of British aid worker Emma McCune and Riek Machar, the local warlord she marries, and a revealing look at Sudan: a world where international aid often fuels armies instead of the starving, and where the Islamic government is locked in battle with other religious and tribal groups over oil. Emma’s War is being adapted as a film for Twentieth Century Fox starring Nicole Kidman.

“Scroggins connects the issues at the heart of the civil war with the very issues that are at present shaking the foundations of the West,” said Fertel Foundation president Randy Fertel. “Reading Emma’s War, we come to understand not only this local war but the ongoing global struggle of militant Islam against the encroachments of well-meaning Western modernism.”