Ian Buruma

Buruma served as Editor of The New York Review of Books from 2017 to 2018. He has been a frequent contributor to the Review since 1985. From 2003 to 2017 he taught at Bard College, where he was the Paul W. Williams Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism. Living in Japan from 1975 to 1981, Buruma worked as a film reviewer, photographer, and documentary filmmaker. In the 1980s, Buruma was based in Hong Kong, where he edited the cultural section of the Far Eastern Economic Review. In 2008, Buruma won the International Erasmus Prize for exceptional contributions to culture, society, or social sciences in Europe, and he also received the Shorenstein Journalism Award from Stanford University in 2008. He is a fellow of the European Council on Foreign Relations and a board member of Human Rights in China. Buruma has written extensively on European politics, human rights, and the culture of Asia, particularly that of China and 20th-century Japan.