MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

Roy Gutman

Roy Gutman has reported on international affairs for more than three decades,and is currently the foreign editor for Newsweek. From 1989 to 1994, he served as the Newsday European bureau chief, reporting on the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, the unification of Germany, and the violent disintegration of Tito's Yugoslavia. His reports on "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia-Herzegovina, including the first documented accounts of Serb-run concentration camps, won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting (1993), the George Polk Award for foreign reporting, the Selden Ring Award for investigative reporting, the Hal Boyle award of the Overseas Press Club, the Heywood Broun Award of the Newspaper Guild, a special Human Rights in Media award of the International League for Human Rights, and other honors. In 2002, he was a co-winner of the Edgar Allen Poe award of the White House Correspondents' Association, and in 2003, the National Headliners First Prize for Magazines.

Gutman reported for Reuters in Bonn, Vienna, Belgrade, London and Washington, including stints as the Belgrade bureau chief and State Department correspondent. His 19 years at Newsday included eight years as national security reporter in Washington.

He is the author of "Banana Diplomacy: The Making of American policy in Nicaragua 1981-1987" (Simon & Schuster 1988), named one of the 200 best books of 1988 by the New York Times and the best American book of the year by the London Times Literary Supplement; and "A Witness to Genocide: The 1993 Pulitzer prize winning dispatches on the 'Ethnic Cleansing' of Bosnia" (Macmillan 1993). The latter was published in eight countries, including in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the last year of the conflict.

Gutman and essayist David Rieff co-edited "Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know" (W.W. Norton 1999), which reduces the main precepts of international humanitarian law to a set of tools reporters can use in reporting conflict. Bill Kovach, while Nieman foundation curator, said the book "should be--and I think will be--a handbook for every journalist that deals with international affairs, and probably should be in the book case of every journalist, period." The book gave rise to a small non-profit education project at American University in Washington, D.C., which is updating the text, overseeing foreign language editions, and developing other projects including a journalism school curriculum and Web site. Chinese, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Russian editions have been published, and Arabic, Dutch, and Serbo-Croatian editions are in the works.

Gutman is fluent in German, has a reading ability in French and Serbo-Croatian, and has a grounding in Russian.

Born in New York City and a graduate of William Hall High School in West Hartford, Conn., he earned a BA in History from Haverford College and an MSc degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics. Gutman received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Haverford in 1995 and was the Marvin Weissberg Professor in International Relations at Beloit College in 2002. A past president of Overseas Writers, the oldest association of diplomatic correspondents in Washington, he lives with his wife and daughter in Herndon, Va.