Behind the Kingdom's Veil

Marketing Bullets Award-winning Der Spiegel journalist, Susanne Koelbl, appears regularly in German-language media and was most recently distinguised with the Award for Courage by Reporters without Borders. She regularly gives lectures abroad and in the US contextualizing current events in the Middle East, such as the war in Syria and the Afghanistan crisis. Her deep knowledge of and experience reporting up-close on Saudia Arabia, as evidenced in Behind the Kingdom's Veil, dovetails with increasing interest in America's closest, yet most mysterious ally in the Middle East. October 2019 is the one-year anniversity of jouralist Jamal Kashoggi's assasination. Lonely Planet is updating its Saudi Arabia guide for the first time in twenty-five years. The country is gaining attention for its outward show of relaxing cultural strictures such as the ban on women drivers, but Susanne's unique reporting from the inside reveals that Saudi Arabia is becoming more authoritarian. The original German-language book (published in June 2019) has sold over 17K print copies in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and was awarded the an ITB BookAward in 2020 for the "Culture" category. Potential endorsers: Thomas Friedman, bestselling author and New York Times columnist; Anderson Cooper, journalist/TV personality, CNN; Hamid Karzai, former president of Afghanistan