Roy Gutman
Freelance Writer
Recipient of the 2016 Award for Commentary
Roy Gutman has been a foreign affairs journalist in Washington and abroad for more than four decades. He’s reported on the Middle East for the past five years, first as Baghdad bureau chief and later Middle East bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, based in Istanbul. He’s currently a freelance reporter covering the Middle East from Istanbul. At Newsday, his reports on “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia-Herzegovina, including the first documented accounts of Serb-run concentration camps, won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting (1993), the George Polk Award for foreign reporting, the Selden Ring Award for investigative reporting and other honors. He was part of the McClatchy team that won the George Polk award for foreign reporting in 2013, and in 2016, the National Press Club named him runner-up in the Edward M. Hood prize for Diplomatic Correspondence. He wrote Banana Diplomacy (1988) and A Witness to Genocide (1993), and co-edited Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know (second edition, 2007). How We Missed the Story, Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban, and the Hijacking of Afghanistan, was published in a second edition in 2013 by the USIP press. Designated one of “50 visionaries who are changing your world” by the Utne Reader, he was named an honorary citizen of Bosnia-Herzegovina and awarded a key to the city of Sarajevo, April 2010.