IAN BURUMA
Ian Buruma was educated in Holland and Japan, where he studied history, Chinese literature, and Japanese cinema.
In 1970s Tokyo, he acted in Kara Juro's Jokyo Gekijo and participated in Maro Akaji's butoh dancing company Dairakudakan, followed by a career in documentary filmmaking and photography. In the 1980s, he worked as a journalist, and spent much of his early writing career travelling and reporting from all over Asia.
Buruma now writes about a broad range of political and cultural subjects for major publications, most frequently for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Corriere della Sera, The Financial Times, and The Guardian.
He was Cultural Editor of The Far Eastern Economic Review, Hong Kong (1983-86) and Foreign Editor of The Spectator, London (1990-91), and has been a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington D.C., St. Antony's College, Oxford, and Remarque Institute, NYU.
He has delivered lectures at various academic and cultural institutions world-wide, including Oxford, Princeton, and Harvard universities. He is currently Henry R. Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.
Latest News:
Ian Buruma was voted as one of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals by the Foreign Policy/Prospect magazines (May/June 2008).
Ian Buruma's novel China Lover (Penguin USA) will be published in September 2008.
Ian Buruma was awarded the 2008 international Erasmus Prize for making "an especially important contribution to culture, society or social science in Europe." The ceremony will be held on November 7, 2008 in Rotterdam.
Ian Buruma was awarded the 2008 Shorenstein Journalism Award, an annual award which "honors a journalist not only for a distinguished body of work, but also for the particular way that work has helped American readers to understand the complexities of Asia." It is awarded jointly by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Center in the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, and the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (Penguin USA) was the winner of The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the Best Current Interest Book.
His September 4, 2006 article "The Freedom to Offend" (The New Republic) is included in The Best American Essays 2007.
See his monthly columns for Project Syndicate.