Chris Ayres
American writer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Chris Ayres is an English born screenwriter, a contributing editor at British GQ,[1] and author. He wrote the book War Reporting for Cowards, and co-wrote Ozzy Osbourne's memoir I Am Ozzy, which became a New York Times Best-Seller.
As a screenwriter, he has sold scripts to Apple TV+, CBS network and Ingenious Media, the latter in partnership with XIX Entertainment and Endeavor Content.[2]
Ayres's recent work for British GQ has included a long-form article about Donald Trump's friendship with Mike Tyson in the late 1980s,[3] and an in-depth profile of Instagram star Dan Bilzerian.[4]
War Reporting for Cowards
First published in 2005, War Reporting for Cowards is an account of being embedded with a forward reconnaissance unit of the U.S. Marines in the run-up to - and during - the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Ayres was in his late 20s and working for The Times of London, covering entertainment, at the time.[5]
Writing in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani described the book as "hilarious," adding that it "reads as though Larry David had rewritten 'MASH' and Evelyn Waugh's 'Scoop' as a comic television episode, even as it provides the reader with a visceral picture of the horrors of combat and the peculiar experience of being an embedded reporter."[6] War Reporting for Cowards is today taught in journalism schools.[7]
Academic analysis has described the memoir as a parody of the traditional war correspondent memoir that deconstructs the heroic myth of the war of the correspondent through irony and satire.[8]
Career
Ayres was Los Angeles bureau chief of The Times of London from 2002 until 2010, later becoming a contributing editor at The Sunday Times Magazine (London)[9] and British GQ. He wrote a column with Ozzy Osbourne for Rolling Stone for several years.[10]
Ayres was nominated as Foreign Correspondent of the Year in 2004 and Feature Writer of the Year in 2015 at the British Press Awards.[11]
He was nominated as Writer of the Year in 2016 at the Professional Publishers Association (PPA) Awards.[12]
I Am Ozzy won the Literary Achievement award (2010) at the Guys Choice Awards.[13]
Education
Ayres was educated at The University of Hull, where the Chris Ayres Prize in Politics, Philosophy and Economics is named after him, later completing a postgraduate diploma in newspaper journalism at City University, London.