Roy Gutman

Roy Gutman has been a foreign affairs journalist in Washington and abroad for more than four decades. He reported on the Middle East for seven years as Baghdad bureau chief and Middle East bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, based in Istanbul, then freelanced for Foreign Policy, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Politico Europe and The Daily Beast.

At Newsday, 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 and the Selden Ring Award for investigative reporting. He shared the George Polk award for foreign reporting in 2013 with McClatchy colleagues, and in 2016 was runner-up for the Edward M. Hood prize for Diplomatic Correspondence of the National Press Club. He wrote Banana Diplomacy (1988) and A Witness to Genocide (1993), and co-edited Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know (second edition, 2007). How We Missed the Story, Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban, and the Hijacking of Afghanistan, was published in a second edition in 2013 by USIP press. Designated one of “50 visionaries who are changing your world” by the Utne Reader, he was named an honorary citizen of Bosnia-Herzegovina and awarded a key to the city of Sarajevo in 2010. The American Academy of Diplomacy awarded him the Arthur Ross prize for Distinguished Reporting and Analysis of Foreign Affairs in 2016.

In 2017, Gutman established the Crisis Zone Reporting Project to promote encourage the reporting of citizen-journalists in inaccessible war zones. Eight “letters” from the interior have been published. In 2018, the International Law Committee of the American Bar Association awarded him the Frances Shattuck Security and Peace Award for “creativity, initiative and courage” in the cause of international security and peace.