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Alan Cowell

After a long career as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times based in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, Alan Cowell became a freelance contributor in 2015, based in London.

Beginning in 1981, Mr. Cowell was based in Nairobi, Kenya; Johannesburg; Athens; Cairo; Rome; Bonn and Berlin; London; and Paris. His coverage of South Africa during the tumultuous 1980s won a George Polk Award, but prompted the apartheid authorities to expel him in early 1987. As digital platforms assumed ever greater importance, Mr. Cowell focused on breaking news for NYTimes.com, but also wrote a regular print column, “Letter from Europe,” for international readers.

Mr. Cowell is the author of several works of fiction and nonfiction, including “The Terminal Spy” (2008), an authoritative account of the life and death of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former Soviet KGB officer poisoned in London in 2006 with a rare radioactive isotope. His first two novels, “A Walking Guide” (2003) and “The Paris Correspondent” (2011), chronicled the travails of a fictitious foreign correspondent, Joe Shelby. In 2016 he published his third novel, “Permanent Removal,” set in post-apartheid South Africa. A new novel, “Cat Flap,” is to be published in New York in 2018.

Before he joined The Times, Cowell worked for the Swiss Broadcasting Service in Bern, Switzerland, and for the Reuters news agency in Germany, Britain, Turkey, Lebanon, Zambia and Zimbabwe. He is the last Reuters correspondent known to have filed dispatches by carrier pigeon. 

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