Ian Cosh

Writer and anthropologist

Literary non-fiction drawn from oral history, ethnography, and the archive.

• Ghosts of Ortona — new book

© Ian Cosh. All rights reserved.

About

I’m a writer who works at the intersection of oral history, ethnography, and literary nonfiction. My writing is concerned with memory, listening, and the ways history is carried in individual lives.Trained as an anthropologist, I conducted my doctoral fieldwork with veterans and civilian survivors of a little-known Second World War battle, recording extended conversations and working across local, regimental, national, and private archives. That work shaped my ongoing interest in how people turn experience into story — what surfaces in the telling, and what remains submerged.My first book, Ghosts of Ortona: Reckoning with the Traumas of Canadian WWII Veterans, returns to that fieldwork decades later, revisiting those conversations to trace the battle’s long aftermath with the clarity of time and distance.I’ve lived and worked in Canada, Italy, England, the United States, and southern Africa — experiences that continue to shape how I listen and write. I'm now based in Toronto.

Books

Ghosts of Ortona: Reckoning with the Traumas of Canadian WWII Veterans

More than twenty years ago, I conducted fieldwork with veterans and civilian survivors of the battle of Ortona in Italy. As a young anthropologist, I set out to document people’s recollections of the battle and soon found myself stuck with questions I couldn’t answer — discrepancies, silences, and emotions I didn’t yet know how to interpret.Written decades later, Ghosts of Ortona returns to those early conversations, tracing the battle’s long aftermath and the questions that lingered years after the interviews ended. Grounded in extended interviews and archival research, it explores the psychological and moral dimensions of survival, the hidden costs of violence, and how we make sense of war."A fascinating and insightful exploration of the intangible wounds of war. A reminder that what many soldiers recall decades or a lifetime afterwards isn’t an analytical reconstruction of the war, its strategies, plans and ideologies, but the more universal sentiments of fear, camaraderie, loyalty and a shared humanity, even with their opponents."
— Stephen R. Bown, historian; recipient of the Governor General's History Award for Popular Media“An extraordinarily moving and insightful account of veterans and their struggles to repress or heal the emotional wounds of war.”
— Alistair Thomson, oral historian; Professor Emeritus, Monash University; author of Anzac Memories“In humane and lucid language, Cosh explores both the nature of war and the forever wounds it leaves. There are rich insights on virtually every page of this horribly beautiful story.”
— Catherine Lutz, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Brown University; co-founder of the Costs of War projectAvailable April 7 in Canada and the U.S.; May 19 in the U.K. and Australia.

Notes

Coming soon