Tim Judah

Tim Judah is a journalist and author and covers the Balkans and other regions as a correspondent for The Economist.

He has worked for many major publications and broadcasters, notably writing wartime reportage from Afghanistan to Ukraine for the New York Review of Books.

He is 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—and published a book on the conflict in Ukraine – In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine in 2016.

From 1990 to 1991, Judah lived in Bucharest and covered the aftermath of communism in Romania and Bulgaria for The Times and The Economist. After that, he moved to Belgrade for both publications in order to cover the war in Yugoslavia. He moved back to London in 1995 but continues to travel to the region frequently.

In 2009 he was a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at LSEE, the south-east Europe research unit of the European Institute at the London School of Economics, where he developed the concept of the ‘Yugosphere’.

In 2018-19 he was a fellow of the Europe’s Futures project of the Institute for Human Sciences / IWM in Vienna and researched demography and depopulation in central and eastern Europe and the Balkans. A series of articles has been published as a result on Balkan Insight / Reporting Democracy and the Erste Stiftung website, as well as articles in The Economist and elsewhere.

He is the president of the Board of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) and also president of the board of the Kosovar Stability Initiative (IKS).

Over the past two decades, Judah has worked around the world for The Economist, the New York Review of Books and others. He has notably reported from countries such as Niger, Senegal, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, Darfur, Haiti, France and Armenia.

In 2008 he published Bikila: Ethiopia’s Barefoot Olympian for Reportage Press about the life and times of the first black African to win a gold medal at the 1960 Olympics in Rome, which led him to be shortlisted in the ‘best new sportswriter’ category of the 2009 British Sports Book Awards.