PERSON: Indira Lakshmanan

The Boston Globe

Columnist

Indira Lakshmanan is a Washington columnist for The Boston Globe, writing about foreign policy and politics, and a contributor to POLITICO Magazine. She has covered presidential campaigns and interviewed leaders in the U.S. and around the world, reporting from 80 countries on six continents. She traveled regularly with Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry for Bloomberg News, and interviewed Clinton more than a dozen times for Bloomberg TV, Radio and Businessweek.

For two years, she wrote a “Letter from Washington” column for the International Herald Tribune, the overseas edition of The New York Times, and Bloomberg.

Indira is a frequent contributor to TV and radio, and has been a guest host for NPR programs including “Weekend Edition,” “The Diane Rehm Show” and “Here and Now,” and for shows on WGBH-TV and Bloomberg TV. She started her career on the foreign desk at National Public Radio in Washington and covering the transition from dictatorship to democracy in Chile.

Indira was posted overseas for 12 years, as The Boston Globe’s Asia Bureau Chief, its Latin America Bureau Chief, and a Bosnia War correspondent. She covered the fall of the Taliban and the Afghan War, the rebel insurgency in Colombia and China’s rapid change since the death of Deng Xiaoping. She embedded with sea pirates in the Philippines, Maoist rebels in Nepal and Khmer Rouge holdouts in Cambodia. Her work exposed child labor in Bolivian mines, unregulated logging in the Amazon and illegal incarceration of children in Nepal.

Indira graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and did graduate study at Oxford University as a Rotary Scholar. In 2003, she was awarded a Nieman fellowship at Harvard.

— pbs.org