Nick Thorpe is a writer and award-winning BBC journalist, specialising in eastern Europe, born in England in 1960.
He studied Modern Languages at the Universities of Reading (UK), Dakar (Senegal) and Freiburg (Germany), graduating in 1982.
He has lived in Budapest since 1986. He reported on the fall of Communism throughout eastern Europe and the break-up of Yugoslavia for the BBC, Observer, Guardian and Independent newspapers, including the wars in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia.
He has been Central Europe Correspondent for the BBC since 1996.
With BBC colleagues, he won a Peabody award for his coverage of the Refugee crisis in 2015.
He is the author of 3 books and many essays, including:
The Danube – A Journey Upriver from the Black Sea to the Black Forest (Yale University Press, 2013)
1989 – The Unfinished Revolution – Power and Powerlessness in Eastern Europe (Reportage Press 2009, Endeavour Press 2015).
A Jar of Wild Flowers – essays in honour of John Berger (Zed Books, November 2016)
The Road Before Me Weeps – Refugees on the Route to Europe
Scolar Kiado Budapest, April 2018/ to be published by Yale University Press, April 2019.
He has directed 10 films:
The Fairy Island (documentary, 1993)
Vigilance (feature, 1997)
The Vineleaf and the Rose (documentary, 2001)
The Travels of a Gadjo in Romanistan, seven 52 minute documentaries on Roma communities in 9 European countries (Duna TV, 2015).
Selected links:
TedxBudapest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmGfpSWx5tU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Thorpe
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/Viktor_Orban
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