Roger Cohen was named Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times in 2009. Prior to that, Mr. Cohen wrote a column for the Times Company-owned International Herald Tribune. Mr. Cohen joined The Times in 1990. He served as a foreign correspondent for more than a decade before becoming acting Foreign Editor on September 11, 2001, and, six months later, Foreign Editor, a senior management position.
Previously, Mr. Cohen was a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and Reuters, reporting from the Middle East, South America and Europe. From 1977 to 1979, Mr. Cohen worked as a freelance journalist based in Paris. He is co-founder of Speakeasy, a newspaper for students learning English, launched in 1978 by Fernand Nathan, the French publisher.
Mr. Cohen has authored many boo ks, including “The Girl From Human Street: A Jewish Family Odyssey” (Penguin, 2015), “Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis’ Final Gamble” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005) and “Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo” (Random House, 1998), an account of the wars of Yugoslavia’s destruction.
In 2001, Mr. Cohen won the Peter Weitz Prize from the German Marshall Fund for dispatches from Europe, an Overseas Press Club citation for a series on immigration, and the Arthur F. Burns Prize for commentary on German-American relations. In 1999, Mr. Cohen was awarded the Overseas Press Club Citation for Excellence for “Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo,” and in 1995 he won the Overseas Press Club of America Burger Human Rights Award for his investigation of torture and murder at a Serb-run Bosnian concentration camp. He received the Overseas Press Club of America Citation of Excellence for coverage of Third World debt in 1987, and the Inter-American Press Association “Tom Wallace” Award for feature writing in 1989.
In 2012, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the New Century Foundation’s International Media Council in Britain. In 2017, he won the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) Excellence in Opinion Writing Award for “Australia’s Offshore Cruelty,” an examination of the treatment of refugees in Manus and Nauru.
He has been awarded the Joe Alex Morris lectureship for distinguished foreign correspondence by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, has served as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University, and was the inaugural Chair of the Poynter Center at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Read Roger Cohen’s address here
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