Biography

In three decades with The New York Times, Seth Mydans has reported on genocide in Cambodia; war in Chechnya; repression in the Soviet Union; the ousters of Marcos in the Philippines and Suharto in Indonesia; massacres in Sri Lanka, East Timor, Thailand and Russia; uprisings in Myanmar; the Asian tsunami of 2004, and gang wars, riots and the trial of O.J. Simpson in Los Angeles.

He's won the Walter H. Shorenstein Award for coverage of Asia, the Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence on Reporting on Asia and the Society of Publishers in Asia Award for Excellence in Human Rights Reporting, as well as 10 New York Times Publisher's Awards.

Seth Mydans worked for three years for a construction company in Vietnam before entering journalism as a copy editor at the Boston Globe. Since then he has been based in Moscow, London, Los Angeles and Southeast Asia for the Associated Press, Newsweek and The New York Times. He spent his childhood in Japan, Britain, the USSR and New York and speaks several languages. He is the son of the novelist and war correspondent Shelley Mydans, and of Carl Mydans, one of the original photographers at Life magazine. He now lives with his wife in New York and Bangkok.

On Red Square as a boy in 1960 (partially visible behind his father, the photographer Carl Mydans).

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