Vicky Ward

Early life

Her portrait, taken by photographer Jason Bell, is hung in the British National Portrait Gallery as part of Bell's series "An Englishman in New York."

Journalism career

Ward began her journalism career at Condé Nast, followed by a position at the Daily Telegraph, writing features and the weekly "Financial Diary". Later Ward became the editor of The Independent's "Diary". She was a runner up for Britain’s annual award for feature writing by women journalists under 25.

Before moving to the United States in 1997, Ward wrote for a number of British publications, including the Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times magazine and the Daily Mail, for which she became the features correspondent in the US.

In 1998, Ward was appointed Features and News Features editor at the New York Post, before becoming the executive editor of Talk magazine in 1999. Starting in 2001, she became a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, while also writing a column for The London Evening Standard and writing for Huffington Post, The Financial Times, and The New York Times. In September 2015, Ward became the editor-at-large for Town and Country Magazine writing a column entitled The One Percent, as well as several investigative long form features a year. Most recently, she started contributing to Esquire.

During her eleven years at Vanity Fair, Ward worked as an investigative reporter, profiling such figures as Hewlett-Packard chief Carly Fiorina, counter-terrorist expert Richard Clarke, Vivendi former chief Jean-Marie Messier, and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. She wrote about CIA agent Valerie Plame in a 2004 article. Ward has also written about the worlds of art and society, chronicling disputes at the Getty Museum and at New York's Guggenheim, and profiling art collector and luxury magnate François Pinault as well as art publisher Louise MacBain. She has also profiled society figures Leila Hadley Luce and the late Brooke Astor.

Ward has also contributed to news programs on CNBC, Bloomberg News, and Fox Business News. On CNBC, she has appeared on various programs to discuss topics including the glass ceiling, the battle for the Tribune Newspaper Group, and war profiteering, in an interview with War, Inc. actor John Cusack. She has also discussed the "booming call-girl industry", having profiled Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the “D. C. Madam” (with whom she was in close communication up until Palfrey’s recent suicide), as well as making various appearances discussing former Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer in the days following his prostitution scandal.

Ward's first non-fiction book, The Devil’s Casino: Friendship, Betrayal, and the High Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothers, released by John F. Wiley & Sons, Inc in April 2010, became a New York Times bestseller, and was shortlisted for the Spear's Financial Book of the Year Award. Writing for The Washington Post, Stanley Bing wrote, "Ward carefully and skillfully tracks the last 25 or so years of the great, doomed enterprise, and her portrait of a business entity is often engaging, spicy and amusing. I particularly enjoyed the horror stories about those few, strategically challenged souls who had the temerity not to learn golf." The Financial Times also praised the book, saying, "Ward hones [sic] in on Lehman's central problems better than even she could have known. [The Devil's Casino is] the closest thing to a bodice-ripper that the 2008 meltdown is likely to produce," although James Pressley, writing for the AP, took issue with the book's use of anonymous sources.

Ward's second book, The Liar's Ball: The Extraordinary Saga of How one Building Broke the World's Toughest Tycoons, was released by John F. Wiley & Sons, Inc in October 2014. In June 2015, it was announced that the story is being developed as a possible feature film by J.C. Chandor and A24 Productions.

In recognition for her journalistic work, Ward received Women: Inspiration and Enterprise's first media award in September 2010.

Most recently, Ward published a feature on Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the father-daughter billionaire part-owners of Breitbart and key funders of the Trump campaign, that focuses on their attempts to influence the 2016 race using their data firm, Cambridge Analytica.