Elaine Sciolino

Elaine Sciolino is a Paris correspondent and former Paris bureau chief for The New York Times, writing from France since 2002.

She began her journalism career as a researcher at Newsweek magazine in New York, later becoming national correspondent in Chicago, foreign correspondent in Paris, bureau chief in Rome and roving international correspondent.

Sciolino was the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in 1982-1983, the first woman to receive that honor.

She joined The New York Times in 1984, where she has held a number of posts, including United Nations’ bureau chief, Central Intelligence Agency correspondent and chief diplomatic correspondent — the first woman to hold that post.

Her first book, The Outlaw State: Saddam Hussein’s Quest for Power and the Gulf Crisis, was published by John Wiley & Sons in 1991 and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

Her next book, Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran, was first published by The Free Press in 2000 and was updated in a new edition in 2005. It was awarded the 2001 New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism and the Overseas Press Club Cornelius Ryan Citation for nonfiction. Sciolino was also honored by Columbia University’s Encyclopedia Iranica project in 2001 “for presenting the best of Iran to the world.”

Her new book, La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life, was published by Henry Holt/Times Books in June 2011. The book is in its fifth printing in the United States and was named one of the best books of 2011 by The New York Times Magazine. The French edition will be published by Presses de la Cité in February 2012.

For the fall term 2010, she served as a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. For the 2010-2011 academic year, she was also a Visiting Scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.

In 2010, she was decorated a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, the highest honor of the French state, for her “special contribution” to the friendship between France and the United States.

Born in Buffalo, New York, she graduated summa cum laude from Canisius College in 1970 and received a master’s degree in European History from New York University in 1971. She holds honorary doctorate degrees from Syracuse University, Canisius College and Dowling College. She is one of the only non-French members of Femmes Forum, a Paris-based private club of 200 of the leading women living in France.

Sciolino lives in Paris with her husband, Andrew Plump, an attorney with the French law firm of Darrois, Villey, Maillot, Brochier. They have two daughters, Alessandra and Gabriela Plump.