Elaine Sciolino

Elaine Sciolino is a writer and former Paris bureau chief for The New York Times, writing from France since 2002. Her new book, "The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs" will be published by W.W. Norton & Co. in November 2015.

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 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.” In 2011, La Séduction: How the French Play the Game of Life, was published by Henry Holt /Times Books. Her new book, The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs, will be published in November 2015 by W.W. Norton.

For the fall term 2010, she served as a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. In 2010, she was decorated a chevalier of the Legion of Honor for her “special contribution” to the friendship between France and the United States. 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.

In 2015, she served as the expert lecturer on the first New York Times-led tour to Iran.

A daughter of Anthony R. Sciolino (d. 2002)and his wife, the former Jeanette Limeri (d. 2005), Sciolino has two siblings, Thomas and Marianne. She is married to Andrew R. Plump (an American attorney with the Paris office of the British law firm Linklaters), with whom she has two daughters, Alessandra and Gabriela, and currently lives in Paris.