April 27, 1999
Web posted at: 5:32 p.m. EDT (2132 GMT)

(CNN) -- Philip Gourevitch is on the verge of the literary world's equivalent of a hat trick, in position to win his third major book award in the past week.

His book "We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda" has won the award for best nonfiction book on foreign affairs from the Overseas Press Club of America. It's also taken the Los Angeles Times Book prize.

Tuesday night in New York, the winner is to be announced in the PEN/Martha Albrand award competition for first non-fiction: Gourevitch is a nominee.

And that's not all -- in March, he was given the general nonfiction prize of the National Book Critics Circle.

Contacted Tuesday at his office at "The New Yorker," Gourevitch spoke about writing his first book on the topic of the 1994 genocidal killings of more than half a million Rwandan Tutsis.

"I went to Rwanda," Gourevitch said, "to do one single self-contained magazine piece for 'The New Yorker.' The piece was to look back a year after the massacres and consider what the survivors must face in trying to reconstitute their society after such a bloodbath.

"After getting that one to bed, I faced the normal question of a magazine reporter and said, 'What next?' But it had gotten under my skin -- the scope of it, the complexity of it. The story was not over."

Gourevitch had retraced the events of Rwanda's recent horrific past, as the Hutu-extremist government then in power called for members of the the Hutu majority to do away with the Tutsi minority. By some estimates, as many as 800,000 people were slaughtered in some 100 days' time.

Legions of survivors were in refugee camps, but "those camps could not remain indefinitely." The killing had ended, but how was the nation going to get over the fact that neighbor had slain neighbor? "Nobody knew how that would happen," Gourevitch said.

"I started to think, 'I want to keep covering this period', he said. "I went through my notes (and decided) that 'There's a book here.'"

So Gourevitch went back to Rwanda six times in a period of two-and-a-half years. All told, he spent nine-and-a-half months there.

Did the Hutus and the Tutsis like the fact that he was trying to tell the story of their agony? "They saw what I was writing," he said. "Some of it they liked, and some of it they didn't like. But there was a feeling that I was very much there. That made people see that I wasn't doing a quickie. And the questions I asked became increasingly detailed. I could have a conversation that I couldn't when I had first gotten there."

Gourevitch says coming in from the outside was a benefit in many ways. "I had relatively few preconceived notions when I went to Rwanda because I was extremely ignorant of the place ... and I had the leisure to think something, and then rethink it. At times I thought I knew what I was seeing, and then I realized I hadn't known."

Many people -- survivors and killers -- were willing to talk to him. "It was eerie to constantly to be in a place where nearly everyone is a murderer, friends of murderers, victims, or friends of victims," he said. "No one in Rwanda is untouched."

And it wasn't like he was interviewing, say, a group of American veterans immediately after that nation's costly 19th century Civil War. "These weren't soldiers," he emphasized. "These were people who suddenly had taken to their neighbors and killed them.

"They weren't just random murders; this was not chaos," he said. "This was hyper-organized political slaughter, on a mass scale, that looked like chaos."

Since the killings were ordered by the government, "in Rwanda during the genocide, killing Tutsis was not a crime. It was technically the law of the land. And those who were not killing were in danger. It was a world turned upside down."