Published in 2025
208 pages
Cecilia Sala is a journalist, war correspondent, and podcaster. Her reporting has appeared in L’Espresso, Vanity Fair, and Wired. She has covered crises in Venezuela, protests in Chile, Iran, the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August 2021, and the war in Ukraine. On December 19, 2024, she was arrested in Tehran by the Iranian regime and held in solitary confinement in Evin Prison, where she remained for three weeks before being released. Soon after been freed, she returned to reporting from the field, continuing to cover global conflicts and political upheavals.
Oonagh Stransky has been a translator of Italian literature for over twenty years. Some of the writers whose work she has brought into English include Pier Paolo Pasolini, Carlo Lucarelli, Giuseppe Pontiggia, and Roberto Saviano. Stransky studied Italian at Middlebury Language Schools, received her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Mills College and UC Berkeley in 1989, and her M.A. in Italian from Columbia University in 2002. She currently lives in Italy. Her translation of Domenico Starnone’s The House on Via Gemito was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and for the American Literary Translators Association 2024 Italian Prose in Translation Award.
What is this book about?
A powerful, unflinching portrait of a generation fighting for change in Iran, Afghanistan, and Ukraine
“Sala’s dispatches are as immersive and original as they are anthropologically probing… [They] come alive in ways that ordinary newspaper journalism rarely does.”—The New York Times Book Review
In The Fire, acclaimed journalist Cecilia Sala takes readers on a gripping journey through some of the world’s most volatile regions, from Eastern Europe to the Middle East. Through the eyes of young people like Kateryna, a Ukrainian soldier; Assim, an Iranian student at the forefront of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests; Nabila, a Muslim kickboxing champion and lesbian; and Zarifa, a political activist in Afghanistan, Sala offers an intimate portrayal of lives caught amidst turmoil and fighting for a better life.
By immersing herself in their worlds—in their daily lives and political battles—Sala crafts a poignant narrative that captures the human dimension of some of the world’s most intense conflicts. The Fire is a testament to the courage and hunger for freedom of a generation at the forefront of global change.
“This is essential reading for understanding the present.”—Il Messaggero
