The OPC is saddened by the passing of longtime club member and colleague Rod Nordland, a veteran reporter for The New York Times who covered conflict zones for 40 years. Nordland died on June 18 after battling brain cancer since 2018. He was 75. Nordland joined the OPC in 1985 and served as governor in recent years. He won the OPC’s 1999 Ed Cunningham Award for reporting from Kosovo for Newsweek.
Nordland started his career in the early 1970s, eventually landing a position as Southeast Asia correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1979. He worked for Newsweek starting in the mid-1980s, and during his career covered Cambodia and the Vietnam War, the Lebanese Civil War, the Salvadoran Civil War, the First Gulf War, the war in Kosovo, the Iraq War and the War in Afghanistan, among other conflicts. Nordland began working for The New York Times in 2009, and wrote a piece for the paper in 2019 after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He wrote a book about his reflections on his illness, titled Waiting for the Monsoon, which was published in 2024.
In 2022, Nordland wrote an introduction to a piece in the Bulletin about Fatima Faizi, who was a reporter in the Kabul Bureau of The New York Times from 2017 to 2021. In December 2015, he participated in an OPC book night to discuss his work, The Lovers: Afghanistan’s Romeo and Juliet, The True Story of How They Defied Their Families and Survived an Honor Killing Program.
Read more about his career and legacy in the New York Times’ obituary here.