Ian Buruma

Life and career

Buruma was born and reared in The Hague, Netherlands, to a Dutch father and British mother. He studied Chinese literature and history at Leiden University, and then Japanese film at Nihon University in Tokyo, Japan. His wife is the Japanese historian Hotta Eri.

He lived in Japan from 1975 to 1981, where he worked as a film reviewer, photographer and documentary filmmaker. During the 1980s, he edited the cultural section of the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong. He later traveled throughout Asia working as a freelance writer. Buruma is a board member of Human Rights in China and a fellow of the European Council of Foreign Relations. Buruma has contributed numerous articles to The New York Review of Books since 1985. He held fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (1991) and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. (1999), and he is a fellow of St Antony's College in Oxford, UK. In 2000 he delivered the Huizinga Lecture (on "Neoromanticism of writers in exile") in the Pieterskerk in Leiden, Netherlands.

From 2003 to 2017 Buruma was Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights & Journalism at Bard College, New York. In May 2017, he was named editor of The New York Review of Books, where he is scheduled to take over as editor in September 2017. as successor to founding editor Robert B. Silvers, who held the position until his death in March 2017. He has won several prizes for his books, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Theater of Cruelty. He has held a number of editorial and academic positions and has been termed a "well-regarded European intellectual".

Buruma is a nephew of the English film director John Schlesinger, with whom he published a series of interviews in book form.

Scholarship

Buruma argues for wholehearted British participation in the European Union because they are the "strongest champions in Europe of a liberal approach to commerce and politics".

Awards

In 2008 Buruma was awarded the Erasmus Prize, which is awarded to an individual who has made "an especially important contribution to culture, society or social science in Europe".

He is among the 100 top global thinkers of 2010, as selected by the Foreign Policy magazine. Foreign Policy explained his contribution as a public intellectual:

Many liberals these days seem at pains to establish their bona fides as tough-minded hawks when it comes to global threats, but the Dutch man of letters has made a career out of affirming the classic liberalism of the open-door variety. His writing in recent years has attracted the ire of critics who think he equivocates on the dangers of radical Islam, but Ian Buruma made his response this year with a typically judicious and politically relevant book, Taming the Gods, that reflects on the Western capacity for religious pluralism. According to Buruma, Western society is robust enough to embrace even illiberal practices, so long as these are not violent. "Living with values that one does not share", he wrote in a recent column on France's burqa ban, "is a price to be paid for living in a pluralist society".

In April 2012, he was awarded the Abraham Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Life at the Princeton Theological Seminary.

Works