Editor’s Note: Thomas O’Dwyer wrote almost fifty essays for 3QD which you can see here.
by Michal Yudelman-O’Dwyer
Thomas O’Dwyer, my husband, died on Wednesday. He wouldn’t approve of this beginning. In his articles he always came up with something original or intriguing to draw the reader in.
Thomas was so many things, but first of all a writer. He never stopped seeking facts and information up to his last night in hospital. He had a quick Irish temper and no patience for slow understanding or explaining things twice, which sometimes made things difficult, especially if you were always asking him how to do this or that on the computer, or to edit something you wrote, as I did.
He was also generous and caring and had a weakness for street cats, which he fed every day in our building’s back yard until the last trip to the hospital. All our house cats over the generations were street cats who’d wandered in, or which he’d found as kittens.
As a fearless war correspondent, he had hair raising tales, sometimes sounding, how shall I put it, somewhat enhanced. But there was nothing enhanced about his reporting. His pursuit of the truth was relentless and everything he wrote depended on the background of his vast knowledge and understanding.
His daughter Fiona said he’d told her as a child, when he was Reuters’ bureau chief in Nicosia, that as a journalist it was his responsibility to know the history of “every country in the world.” Read more »