In March, the Lebanese writer Lina Mounzer's family home in Beirut was bombed as part of the US-Israeli war on Iran and its neighbours. In an earlier time, Lina might have written about the destruction of her home and of Beirut for a New York magazine or newspaper. But as she tells  Equator's Pankaj Mishra, she has stopped trying to explain the Middle East to Americans.

In this episode, Pankaj asks Lina about The Disaster Correspondent, her memoir-essay about writing for mainstream magazines and newspapers in the US. She recalls the problems of being pigeonholed as a writer and having her work minimised when she was classified by certain print outlets as a disaster correspondent. Pankaj and Lina discuss the complex balance of wanting to raise awareness of the extreme and destabilising events in her home country with the exhausting and predictable way her pieces would be stripped of nuance, severely limiting her identity as a writer.

Read The Disaster Correspondent on Equator. Also read Lina's short essay "My Home is Burning", about the bombing of her family home.