Jack Fairweather

Jack Fairweather built his nonfiction career on reporting from conflict zones and reconstructing lives from archival evidence. The British journalist headed the Daily Telegraph bureau in Baghdad and later reported in Afghanistan for The Washington Post. The Volunteer: The True Story of the Resistance Hero who Infiltrated Auschwitz follows Polish underground officer Witold Pilecki, who entered the camp deliberately and organized resistance from within. Fairweather drew on family papers, newly available records, and interviews with surviving resistance members to recover Pilecki's mission and reports. Penguin released the book in 2019, and it became the overall winner of that year's Costa Book Awards. The work is narrative history, with Fairweather serving as researcher and biographer rather than the volunteer named in its title.