Ian Buruma studied Chinese at Leyden University and film at Nihon University, Tokyo. He has worked as the cultural editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hongkong, as the foreign editor of The Spectator in London. He has won the LA Times Book Award for Murder in Amsterdam, received the Erasmus Prize in 2008, and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for Theater of Cruelty. His books include Bad Elements, Occidentalism, Anglomania, Year Zero, and Their Promised Land. He teaches at Bard College and contributes regularly to the New York Review of Books, and the New Yorker. He writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate.

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