Alec Russell

Alec Russell is the World News Editor of the Financial Times. He started his career as a journalist in Romania in the aftermath of the December 1989 revolution. He was in Bosnia and Croatia during the war from 1991 to 1993 and then spent five years based in South Africa as the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent.  He then became the paper’s foreign editor for the Iraq War. In 2007 he returned to South Africa for the Financial Times for a second stint. Alec has written two books, Prejudice and Plum Brandy (Michael Joseph, 1993), about his time in the Balkans and Big Men, Little Men (Macmillan, 1999 and NYU Press, 2000), a reflection on his time in South Africa in the mid 90s. His writing has won several awards and his dispatches from southern Africa have earned him nominations for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and for British foreign correspondent of the year.