Will Englund

[excerpted from author's website]
I worked for a number of years as a reporter, foreign correspondent, editor and editorial writer for the Sun, which was once a paper that gave its roving journalists considerable latitude in deciding what to write about. Between our first two Moscow stints, I took part in a project that investigated shipbreaking – that is, the scrapping of old ships for their steel – and I roamed from Rhode Island to San Francisco to Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas, and eventually all the way to Alang, in the Indian state of Gujarat. That series won a George Polk award, an Overseas Press Club prize, and the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, in 1998.

Besides India and Russia, I covered war in the Balkans and in Afghanistan, and the Arab Spring in Cairo. I spent five months in Glasgow, working on an exchange for the Glasgow Herald. Sometimes, I guess, you just go where your nose leads you.

It was on a trip to Korea in 2007 that I struck up a friendship that would lead, a few months later, to my joining National Journal as a White House correspondent. This was my first real plunge into Washington journalism, it lasted two-and-a-half years, and it helped give me the courage to tackle the American angle in this book.

I studied English literature as a Harvard undergraduate, because I figured novels would be more interesting than textbooks. Yet it was the master's program at Columbia University's journalism school that actually taught me something about writing. Now I'm finally getting around to the book form.

I still live in Baltimore; I still work at the Washington Post, commuting every day to a job on the foreign desk.