Richard Lloyd Parry

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Richard Lloyd Parry is a British foreign correspondent. He is the Asia Editor of The Times of London, based in Tokyo, and is the author of In the Time of Madness, a non-fiction book about Indonesia and East Timor. In 2005, he was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year in the UK's What The Papers Say Awards.

1 Early life
2 Career in journalism
3 Publication
4 Weblog

[edit] Early life

He was born in Southport, Merseyside in 1969, and was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Crosby and Oxford University. His interest in the Far East was sparked by a trip to Japan in 1986 that was awarded to him as a prize whilst appearing on the UK TV quiz show Blockbusters. In 1995, he became Tokyo correspondent of the British newspaper The Independent and soon began reporting from other countries in Asia.

[edit] Career in journalism

In 1998 he covered the mayhem which led to the fall of President Suharto in Indonesia, and the violence which followed the independence referendum in East Timor. In 2002, he moved to The Times. Altogether he has worked in twenty-four countries, including Afghanistan, North Korea, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, Kosovo and Macedonia. Most recently, he has been a regular visitor to Iraq, and reported from the province of Aceh on the Indian Ocean tsunami.

[edit] Publication

In the Time of Madness was published in 2005. As well as presenting an eye witness account of the events leading up to and following the fall of Suharto, it also dramatised the personal crisis which Lloyd Parry experienced as a young reporter facing the perils and excitements of death and violence.

"I imagined that these experiences had imparted something to my character, an invisible shell which would stand me in good stead", he wrote. "But then I went to East Timor, where I discovered that such experience is never externalised, only absorbed, and that it builds up inside one, like a toxin. In East Timor, I became afraid, and couldn’t control my fear. I ran away, and afterwards I was ashamed."

The Observer called it "a spellbinding account of recent Indonesian history and a thoughtful exploration of how suddenly civilisation and reason can evaporate". The Times' reviewer wrote: "In its refreshing modesty of tone and subtlety of message, it beats the more epic accounts of “heroic” journalists such as John Simpson hands down ... Parry has looked back on his experience in the late 1990s through an unblinkingly self-critical lens."