Lesley Hazleton (born 1945) is an award-winning British-American writer whose work focuses on the intersection of politics, religion, and history, especially in the Middle East. She reported from Israel for Time, and has written on the Middle East for numerous publications including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The Nation, and The New Republic.
Hazleton was born in England, and became a United States citizen in 1994. She was based in Jerusalem from 1966 to 1979 and in New York City from 1979 to 1992, when she moved to her current home in Seattle WA, originally to get her pilot’s license. She has two degrees in psychology (B.A. Manchester University, M.A. Hebrew University of Jerusalem).
She has described herself as “a Jew who once seriously considered becoming a rabbi, a former convent schoolgirl who daydreamed about being a nun, an agnostic with a deep sense of religious mystery though no affinity for organized religion”. “Everything is paradox,” she has said. “The danger is one-dimensional thinking”.
In April 2010, she began blogging as The Accidental Theologist, focusing on religion, politics, and existence. In September 2011, she received The Stranger‘s Genius Award in Literature.
She is currently working on a new biography of Muhammad, (PBUH) to be published by Riverhead/Viking in spring 2013.
Speeches
There exists a video including Lesley’s thoughts about Koran, which was recorded at a TEDx conference in Seattle Washington, October 2010. “Lesley Hazleton sat down one day to read the Koran. And what she found — as a non-Muslim, a self-identified “tourist” in the Islamic holy bookâwasn’t what she expected. With serious scholarship and warm humor, Hazleton shares the grace, flexibility and mystery she found, in this myth-debunking talk from TEDxRainier.”
