Rajiv Chandrasekaran

RAJIV CHANDRASEKARAN is a senior correspondent and associate editor at The Washington Post.

He has served as the Post's national editor and as an assistant managing editor. From April 2003 to October 2004, he was the Post's bureau chief in Baghdad, where he was responsible for covering the reconstruction of Iraq and supervising a team of Post correspondents.

He lived in Baghdad for much of the six months before the war, reporting on the United Nations weapons-inspections process and the buildup to the conflict. Before the U.S.-led war in Iraq, he was the Post's bureau chief in Cairo. Prior to that assignment, he was the Post’s Southeast Asia correspondent, based in Jakarta, Indonesia. In the months following September 11, 2001, he was part of a team of Post reporters who covered the war in Afghanistan and events in Pakistan.

He is the author of “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” a best-selling account of the troubled American effort to reconstruct Iraq. The book, which provides a firsthand view of life inside Baghdad's Green Zone, won the Overseas Press Club award, the Ron Ridenhour Prize and Britain's Samuel Johnson Prize. The New York Times named it one of the 10 Best Books of 2007. It also was a finalist for the National Book Award and the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.

He took a sabbatical from the Post in 2005 to serve as the journalist in residence at the International Reporting Project at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., and as a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.

Chandrasekaran appears regularly on CNN, MSNBC, PBS NewsHour and National Public Radio.

He joined the Post in 1994 as a reporter on the Metropolitan staff. He subsequently served as the paper's Washington-based national technology correspondent. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, he holds a degree in political science from Stanford University, where he was editor in chief of The Stanford Daily. He lives with his wife in Washington, D.C.

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