THE WIND CHANGED DIRECTION

A non-fictional narrative of the impact of the 9/11 attacks on the lives of seven people from three of the countries to have suffered the most from the "War on Terror."

There have been many 9/11 stories told from an American perspective, but Duarte, as a journalist from Brazil, brings to the table a global perspective on a day that forever changed us.

For most people in the United States, the 'other side' - Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan - is just a vague statistic, translated into video images lasting a few seconds showing the victims of suicide bombings, people in refugee camps, or 'radical Islamic terrorists' on the TV news reports. In Afghanistan, during 20 years of war, the longest in American history, more than 157,000 people have died; in Iraq from 2003 to today, nine years after President Obama declared the end of the war, between 185,000 and 600,000 have died; and in Pakistan, the United States' ally in the War on Terror, which turned into a fertile terrain for US drones and suicide bombings, some 70,000 have died.

In THE WIND CHANGED DIRECTION, these statistics acquire faces and voices with a group of men and women who do not know each other but who share the fact that they were forced to change the direction of their lives because of 9/11. Three of the seven protagonists were children when the attacks occurred. One of them only learnt about the attacks almost ten years later, despite his life having been drastically affected by them and his future virtually taken from him. "The Americans had a 9/11, we are living a constant 9/11 even today" - as one of the book's protagonists sums up.

Twenty years after 9/11, THE WIND CHANGED DIRECTION gives a viewpoint rarely seen in the US when many Americans, now living in a post-Trump era and amid the Covid-19 pandemic, are seeing for the first time that they are not the all-powerful, all-knowing masters of the universe, and that their own future depends on looking and listening outside their national borders.

Simone Duarte is an award-winning Brazilian journalist with 30 years of deep immersion in international affairs and experience in managing media organizations on three continents. She was the NY Bureau Chief of TV Globo when 9/11 happened. Simone coordinated and anchored coverage of the attacks to a Brazilian audience of 60 million viewers. This coverage led to the first ever International Emmy nomination for TV Globo, in the news category. Simone was the first Brazilian female journalist to be allowed access to North Korea in the making of En Route to Baghdad (2004).
After 10 years working in New York, she moved to Portugal and worked for Público, Portugal's leading newspaper. Simone headed the newspaper's digital strategy. Público remained at the forefront of Portugal's online newspapers, leading to the European Newspaper Award. Público was the first ever news site to win the prize. She has a MS in International Affairs, The New School, New York (2001/2003), and a bachelor's degree in Communications and Journalism, cum laude, from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1986/1989).
Simone was awarded Honorable Mention from the United Nations Correspondents Association for a 2000 news series on East Timor.
She was the first and only Brazilian journalist to do a one-on-one interview with George H. W. Bush, the 41st President of the United States /1998. And Simone is an Eisenhower Fellow, one of the foremost leadership programs in the US.