Jason Burke Longlist Interview

How does it feel to be longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction 2025?    

 Fantastic, basically. Obviously, it’s really inspiring to be selected and to be among such great writers and works, and if there is one prize you want to be considered for as a writer of big non-fiction books, it has to be the Baillie Gifford. But also it feels like a real validation after many years of work on an insanely ambitious project. I had a very specific idea of what I wanted to do with the book at the outset but doing it was hard and took an awful lot of time and effort. So this kind of recognition tells me that my original idea was a good one and that I was right just to stick at it in spite of my doubts and not to compromise and to keep going and to make it come into the world as I wanted it to be.

 What inspired you to write The Revolutionists?  

I was reading a book published in 1977 about terrorism at the time and there was a quote from a security official saying after an attack: ‘Arabs don’t blow themselves up, only Japanese do’. It just struck me as so interesting that things could change so dramatically, and I wanted to know why. I also was fascinated by all these incidents from the 1970s that I half-remembered, or thought I did, such as the attack on the Munich Olympics or the raid on Entebbe or the Baader Meinhof gang’s various exploits, and just thought it would be worth revisiting them. Once I got into the subject, and started finding these amazing personalities, and understand more about the decade, I was hooked. Finally, I just found so much that was not just relevant to today but genuinely essential to understanding where we are now and that was something of a revelation for me.  

What do you hope readers will take away from your book?

First of all, I want them to just think ‘wow, that was extraordinary, and intense, and important”.  

As for lessons, I’d say the main message is that individuals turn to violence for a whole series of different reasons, often very bad ones, but you can’t simply dismiss them as misled, mad or morally degraded. If you have people who have a grievance, even one that may not be reasonable or justified, some will find a way to seek to find a solution to that grievance, and that will involve violence if there are no alternatives. You can kill or imprison those seeking radical change, you can effectively destroy or repress an organisation, a movement, even an entire ideology. But if you don’t deal with the original grievance in some way, there will be others who will come along who will found a new organisation, often with a new vocabulary and ideas and start to use violence again. So you’ll be back to square one, or often in a worse place.  

 What inspired you to focus on the 1970s as a turning point in global extremism?  

 What really struck me was how the decade began with someone like Leila Khaled, who is very secular, a feminist and a nationalist, who is literally handing out sweets and leaflets to people she has just hijacked, and it ends with massive suicide bombs in trucks driven by militant Islamist young bearded men into big buildings filled with civilians. That is a really seminal change, and it takes us to where we still are now, so I wanted to show why that happened.

 How did your experience as a foreign correspondent inform your approach to writing this book?  

 I suppose the first obvious thing was that I sought out living witnesses to interview, which is what reporters to obviously, but not historians, necessarily. That involved a lot of travelling, sometimes to some complicated places, which obviously I was quite comfortable with. Because I’ve worked and lived in Europe, the Middle East, South Asia and Africa too, that gave me a global perspective which I think brings something different to the narrative. I was really keen to create a sense of place, with all the small details that can do that, whether it was Beirut or Berlin in 1970 or Paris or Vienna in 1975 Tehran or Prague in 1982 so I did a lot of work on the ground, old-fashioned reporting basically, or went through old travel guides, novels, films and so on. Though when I located one of the few surviving DC-10 planes with all its interior intact down - to the cocktail menu in swirly 1970s font – it turned out to be about half an hour drive from my home.

How did you navigate the sheer volume of archival material and interviews to shape your narrative?  

That was probably the hardest thing, particularly because I’m not naturally very organised. I spent weeks and weeks on the structure of the narrative, so all the characters’ stories would fit together and with the events I wanted to describe. I used massive A2 sketchbooks, onto which I drew unbelievably complicated timelines and grids. Then I filed all source material according to when it would become relevant as I wrote. But that kept changing obviously, so I had to completely redo the whole thing loads of times, and obviously add new material as I found it.

When I started the research, it was just in the languages I can read but as the years passed, AI translation really advanced. By the time I was halfway through, I was going through documents, even entire books, in Arabic and Swedish. It was very exciting of course, but the literature and possible avenues of research were just overwhelming. By the final chapters, I knew where I was going, and could keep the sources down to a more manageable level.  

The toughest test was avoiding the rabbit holes. I found myself spending a morning trying to work out which songs were the biggest hits in Baghdad in 1976 and so likely to be playing when Carlos the Jackal was visiting nightclubs there then.  

If you could describe your book in three words, what would they be?

Better than Netflix.