Life and Career
Thomas was born in Nottingham, England. He is the son of Esther Aline (née Lowndes-Moir), a writer on religion, and Anglican priest Victor de Waal. He is the brother of Africa specialist Alex de Waal, barrister John de Waal, and potter and writer Edmund de Waal.
Thomas de Waal graduated from Balliol College, Oxford with a First Class Degree in Modern Languages (Russian and Modern Greek).
He has reported for, amongst others, the BBC World Service, the Moscow Times, and The Times. He was a Caucasus editor at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) in London until December 2008, and later as a research associate with the peace-building NGO, Conciliation Resources. Currently he is a senior associate in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, specializing primarily in the South Caucasus region.
He is the co-author of Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus (New York, 1998) and author of Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War (New York, 2003).
In 2006 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia denied an entry visa to De Waal, who was due to attend in Moscow the presentation of a Russian version of his book on the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, citing a law that says a visa can be refused "in the aims of ensuring state security." De Waal believes that his visa denial was retaliation for his critical reporting about the Russian war in Chechnya. De Waal wrote the introduction to Anna Politkovskaya’s first book in English, A Dirty War.
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