Ed Vulliamy is a British journalist and author, who worked for a decade as a reporter on Granada TV’s World In Action, and for 32 years as an international correspondent for The Guardian and The Observer newspapers of London. He was based in Rome as Southern Europe correspondent for The Guardian from 1990-4 and in New York as U.S. correspondent for The Observer from 1994-2003.
Vulliamy covered the Balkan wars from 1991-5, for which he was awarded every major prize in British journalism. He discovered a gulag of concentration camps, and testified for the prosecution in nine trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, including those against Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadžić and General Ratko Mladić, both convicted for genocide.
He covered the Iraq wars and insurgencies of 1991, and 2003-7.
As U.S. correspondent, Vulliamy’s coverage included the Oklahoma bomb (1995) and militia movements behind it, and Al-Qaida attacks of 11 September 2001, and the aftermaths of both. He also worked in Russia, Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba and Venezuela, and consistently along the US-Mexican border and in Mexico, on drug-trafficking cartels and migration.
His journalistic awards include: Royal Television Society Award for Current Affairs (1985 – Northern Ireland); International Reporter of the Year (1992 & 1996), Granada What The Papers Say Journalist of the Year (1992) and the James Cameron Award (1994 - all for Bosnia); Foreign Press Association Correspondent of the Year (2004 – Iraq).
His books include: the widely-translated Amexica: War Along the Borderline (winner of the Ryszard Kapuśinski Award for Literary Reportage, 2013); The War is Dead, Long Live the War. Bosnia: The Reckoning (shortlisted for the same award, 2015); Everything is Happening: Journey Into a Painting (with Michael Jacobs, 2014, about Diego Veláquez); When Words Fail: A Life With Music, War and Peace (2018, published in the USA as Louder Than Bombs, 2020)
Vulliamy’s reporting on the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was played by Rhys Ifans in Gavin Hood’s movie Official Secrets, starring Keira Knightley, in 2019. In 2020, Vulliamy was president of the jury for the Prix Bayeux awards for war reporting.
His free-lance work includes radio and television programmes for the BBC, on the FARC and Colombian Peace Process for Guardian Films, and articles for The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, Le Monde, La Stampa, Letras Libres, The Irish Times, The Dublin Review of Books and elsewhere. He also writes about music and soccer.
