Christopher Eric Hitchens (born April 13, 1949) is a British-American author, journalist, and literary critic. He has been a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Slate, Free Inquiry, and a variety of other media outlets. He currently lives in Washington, D.C.. Hitchens is also a political observer, whose books — the latest being God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything^[1] — have made him a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. In 2009 Hitchens was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the “25 most influential liberals in U.S. media.” The same article noted, though, that he would “likely be aghast to find himself on this list” and that he “styles himself a radical,” not a liberal.

Hitchens is a polemicist. While he was once identified with the British and American radical political left, he has more recently embraced some arguably centre right causes, notably the Iraq War. Formerly a Trotskyist and a fixture in the left-wing publications of both his native United Kingdom and the United States, Hitchens’ departure from the political left began in 1989 after what he called the “tepid reaction” of the European left following Ayatollah Khomeini‘s issue of a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie. The September 11, 2001 attacks strengthened his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he calls “fascism with an Islamic face.” In 2007, on his 58th birthday, retaining his British citizenship, Hitchens also became an American citizen after having resided in the US for a quarter century.^[3]

Hitchens is known for his ardent admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, and also for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Henry Kissinger, amongst others. He is an anti-theist,^[4] and he describes himself as a believer in the Enlightenment values of secularism, humanism and reason. In September 2008, he was made a media fellow at the Hoover Institution.^[5]

Hitchens is currently writing his memoirs, due for publication in the spring of 2010 ^[6].