Howard W. French

French was a university instructor in the Ivory Coast in the 1980s before becoming a reporter. He has reported extensively on the political affairs of Western and Central Africa. These reports were the basis for the book A Continent for the Taking.

French has also reported on the political and social affairs in China, where he covered the growth of civil society, the government crackdown of dissent in the Dongzhou protests of 2005, and the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, among other topics. His most recent work for The New York Times was centered on China where he was the paper's Shanghai bureau chief, from 2003 to 2008.

French jointed The New York Times in 1986 and was its bureau chief for the Caribbean and Central America from 1990 to 1994, covering Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and numerous other countries. He was one of the newspaper's first black correspondents.[1] For a highly critical review of French's reporting and commentary on Haiti in the early 1990s, see Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti (Common Courage Press, 1994).

From 1994 to 1998, French covered West and Central Africa for the Times, reporting on wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Central Africa, with particular attention to the fall of the longtime dictator of Zaire Mobutu Sese Seko.

From 1998 to 2003, French was Tokyo Bureau Chief for the Times, covering Japan and the Koreas.

In addition to his native English, French speaks Mandarin, French, Spanish, and Japanese.[2] He became Tokyo bureau chief for the Times in 1999, after a year studying Japanese at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He has written frequently for The New York Review of Books and also contributed to The Atlantic and to "The Guardian Longreads" and many other publications.

In addition to covering China as Shanghai Bureau Chief for the Times, French worked as a weekly columnist on regional affairs for the International Herald Tribune. French is the author of " Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War " (Norton/Liveright, 2021), his fifth book. His immediate previous book was the 2017 title, "Everything Under the Heavens: How China's Past Helps Shape its Push for Global Power", French is also an internationally exhibited documentary photographer, whose multi-year project called "Disappearing Shanghai", photographing the rapidly shrinking old quarters of Shanghai, was shown in Asia, Europe and the United States. A book containing this work, Disappearing Shanghai: Photographs and Poems of an Intimate Way of Life, was published in 2012, in collaboration with the novelist and poet Qiu Xiaolong.[3]

French is a member of the board of the Columbia Journalism Review and recent past president of IRIN (since renamed as The New Humanitarian), a not-for-profit news agency that focuses on the humanitarian sector, based in Geneva, Switzerland. He writes a weekly column on international affairs for Foreign Policy.[4]

Fellowships:

• 1999 Jefferson Fellow, East-West Society, Honolulu, Hawaii
• 2011 Open Societies Foundation fellow

Honors

• 2022 Winner, MAAH Stone Book Award for Non-Fiction for Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War
• 2022 Winner, Hurston Wright Award for Non-Fiction for Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War
• 2016 Professor of the Year, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
• 2005 Finalist, Hurston Wright Award for Non-Fiction for A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa
• 2004 Honorary Doctorate - University of Maryland, for commentary on East Asia

• A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, Knopf, 2004.
• China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants are Building a New Empire in Africa, Knopf 2014. ISBN 9780307946652
• Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power, Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. ISBN 9780385353328
• Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, Liveright, 2021. ISBN 9781631495830

• Official website
• Biography
• A Glimpse of the World - Howard French's photos on Flickr
• Howard French on Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, from the Teach the Black Freedom Struggle online series.