Christopher de Bellaigue (born 1971 in London) is a journalist who has worked on the Middle East and South Asia since 1994. His work mostly chronicles developments in Iran and Turkey.
De Bellaigue obtained a BA and MA in Oriental Studies from the University of Cambridge, where he was a student at Fitzwilliam College.[1] His first book, In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize. In 2007-2008, he was a visiting fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford, where he began work on an anticipated biography of the Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh.
De Bellaigue is the Tehran correspondent for The Economist and is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, Granta, and The New Yorker, among other publications. He lives in London with his wife Bita Ghezelayagh, who is an Iranian architect, and two children. [2] He converted to Iranian Shiism sect of Islam in the early part of this decade.
He wrote "Rebel Land: Among Turkey's Forgotten People", an account of the three years he lived in Varto, after publishing an essay in the New York Review of Books about the Turkish "deportations and massacres" of Armenians in 1915 and being told by Professor James R. Russell that he was engaging in genocide denial and scolded by editor Robert Silvers for acting as an "apologist" for the Turks.[3]
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