Richard Read

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Richard Read (born 1957) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist.

Born in St Andrews, Scotland and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Read graduated from Amherst College in 1980 and worked for a Massachusetts crime commission before moving to Portland, Oregon to become a reporter for The Oregonian.

In 1986, Read received a fellowship from the Henry Luce Foundation, which sent him to Bangkok, Thailand, to work for a year as a reporter for The Nation, a Thai newspaper. Read moved in 1987 to Japan, where he freelanced for The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Euromoney and the Yomiuri Shimbun. Read became the first foreign correspondent for a Pacific Northwest newspaper when he opened The Oregonian’s Asia Bureau in Tokyo in 1989. He served on the board of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan. He returned to America in 1994.

In 1996-1997, Read was a Nieman Foundation fellow at Harvard University. He reported in Peru in 1997 as an Eisenhower Exchange Fellow.

Read won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 1999 for a series that dramatized the global effects of the Asian financial crisis through the movement of a container of french fries from a Washington-state farm to a McDonald's restaurant in Singapore. The series also received the Overseas Press Club award for best business reporting from abroad.

In 2000 he received the Oregon governor’s award for achievement in international business, and in 1999 and 2002 he was named the state’s international citizen of the year. In 2003, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Willamette University. He serves on the board of The International School, a full-immersion language elementary school in Portland.

He was also one of four reporters on a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2001 for stories on the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. The team also received the Bruce Baer award for investigative reporting, the Unity Media Award and the American Immigration Lawyers Association media leadership award.

In 2005 Read was a keynote speaker in a series of conferences held at Pontificia Universidad Católica Santa María de los Buenos Aires, where he discussed American public opinion of Argentina and foreign affairs.