Stephen Kinzer

Stephen Kinzer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has reported from more than 50 countries on four continents.

During the late 1990s, Mr. Kinzer was the first New York Times bureau chief in Istanbul. He traveled widely in Turkey and in the new nations of the Caucasus and Central Asia, from Azerbaijan to Uzbekistan. Later he published a book, Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds, which critics praised as “spirited,” “lyrical” and “unusually candid.”

In 1997, Mr. Kinzer traveled to Iran to cover the election in which the reform-minded Mohammad Khatami was chosen president of Iran. His continued interest in Iran led him to write his highly successful book All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. It describes the 1953 coup in which the CIA overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran.

Before his arrival in Istanbul, Mr. Kinzer spent six years in Germany as chief of the Times bureaus in Bonn and Berlin. He covered German unification and events in other parts of Europe, including wars in the former Yugoslavia.

From 1983 to 1989 Mr. Kinzer was the first Times bureau chief in Managua, Nicaragua. In that post he covered war and social upheaval in Central America.

Mr. Kinzer joined the New York Times in 1983 after several years as Latin America correspondent for the Boston Globe. Before joining the Globe, he had been a newspaper columnist, a professor of journalism at Boston University, and a state government official in Massachusetts.

He has written many magazine articles and is co-author of Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. In 1991, he published another book, Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua.

For his outstanding work in Latin America, Columbia University awarded Mr. Kinzer the Maria Moors Cabot gold medal in 1989. The American-Turkish Council gave him its Media Award in 1998, citing him for reporting that “offers a portrait of Turkey that is broadly defined, balanced, comprehensive and accurate.”

Mr. Kinzer studied history at Boston University and graduated with high honors. He is presently a New York Times correspondent based in Chicago.