I am a journalist and author. I am a Special Correspondent for The Economist, covering Ukraine, Balkans, European demography and sometimes other subjects and areas. For the New York Review of Books I have covered wars from Afghanistan to Ukraine. In 2022 I covered the Russian invasion of Ukraine for The Economist and the New York Review of Books. I was also commissioned to write a series of reportage pieces for the FT. In 2018-19 I was a fellow at IWM / The Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna where I began work on a major research and reporting project about demography, depopulation and emigration from CEE and especially the Western Balkans. To date I have published twelve in depth stories on the subject on Balkan Insight / Reporting Democracy and am increasingly being asked to brief people and organisations about this. Recently I have been working with UNDP and UNFPA on demography issues.In 2018 I undertook a major investigative project for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. I also worked for the FT Magazine.I am the author of three books on the Balkans: The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, Kosovo: War & Revenge and Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know. In 2016 my book: In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine was published. From 1990 to 1991 I lived in Bucharest and covered the aftermath of communism in Romania and Bulgaria for The Times and The Economist. After that I moved to Belgrade for both publications in order to cover the war in Yugoslavia. I moved back to London in 1995 but continues to travel frequently to the region. In 2009 I was a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at LSEE, the south-east Europe research part of the European Institute at the London School of Economics, where I developed the concept of the “Yugosphere”. It has been widely accepted and adopted since then.I am the President of the Board of both the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) and the Kosovar Stability Initiative (IKS). In the last two decades I have worked across the world for The Economist, the NYRB and others. Among non-Balkan countries I have reported from are Madagascar, Niger, Senegal, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, Darfur, Haiti, France and Armenia.In 2008 I published very different kind of book. For Reportage Press I wrote Bikila: Ethiopia’s Barefoot Olympian which is about the life and times of the first black African to win a gold medal at the Olympics in Rome 1960. For this I was shortlisted for the best new sportswriter category for the 2009 British Sports Book Awards.