War correspondent and author Thomas Goltz is best known for his accounts of brutal conflict in the post-Soviet Caucasus region during the 1990s, especially his first book Azerbaijan Diary, based on his fellowship research, which recorded the mass killing of Azerbaijanis in 1992. He was an ICWA fellow in Turkey, Uzbekistan, Iraq, Azerbaijan and Iran from 1991 to 1993, and went on to also write books about Armenia, Georgia, Chechnya and elsewhere. His other work included a documentary film about a brutalized village in Chechnya during the first Chechen war in the 1990s, for which he was a finalist for a 1996 Rory Peck Award. He received an honorary doctorate from ADA University in Baku in 2020 for his contributions to understanding between Azerbaijan, its neighbors and the United States.