Photo © David McNeil
Bronwen Maddox appointed editor and chief executive of Prospect magazine (27 October 2010)
BIO
Bronwen Maddox is the Editor and Chief Executive of Prospect Magazine, the UK's leading current affairs and culture monthly title, which has a rapidly-growing circulation of more than 31,000. She was appointed in November 2010 with a mission to build on Prospect's reputation for intellectual rigour and originality, and to take this to a wider audience, as she said in her first editorial. [link].
As she said in Prospect's special sampler edition for the Hay Festival in May 2011: "We publish some of the most informative, perceptive and entertaining writing around today, by outstanding specialists-academics, business leaders, novelists, politicians, soldiers. We write for people who live by ideas, and want to take part in tomorrow's debates today."
She continues to write regular oped and business columns for The Times on world news and economics. Previously, she was Chief Foreign Commentator of The Times, and directed its editorials on foreign affairs. Her commentary has become one of the best-known fixtures in British journalism, known for its crisp style and for not being afraid to reach a judgement on the day’s events, while avoiding political ideology. It attracts vigorous response from readers around the world.
In writing commentaries and columns, which she has done since the start of the Afghan invasion in November 2001, Bronwen Maddox has won access to some of the most influential figures in the British Government and the Bush and Obama Administrations, and in governments across Europe, the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan and India. The Kremlin picked her to be the sole British journalist interviewing then President Vladimir Putin ahead of a controversial G8 summit. She interviewed Benazir Bhutto at her home in Karachi on her triumphant return to Pakistan from exile, shortly before her assassination.
From 1999 until 2003, Bronwen Maddox was also Foreign Editor of the paper, and edited the daily foreign news pages, supervising its coverage of the Kosovo war, the Sierra Leone war, the second Palestinian intifada, and September 11, 2001 (for which The Times won the prestigious Foreign Press Association award for best British coverage).
From 1996 to 1999, she was The Times’ US Editor and Washington Bureau Chief, supervising the paper’s 10 correspondents in the US, and covering President Clinton’s reelection and his second term, until the finale of the Monica Lewinsky affair.
She was previously at the Financial Times, where she ran the paper’s year-long, award-winning, investigation into the publishing tycoon, Robert Maxwell. Before his death, she mapped the 800 companies making up his corporate empire, establishing that the total amount of debt was insupportable; the work culminated in a 30,000-word series, based on 200 interviews, which she wrote on her own, and won the paper a British Press Award. She was also an editorial writer, specialising in microeconomics, and a specialist correspondent in energy and the environment, travelling widely through Eastern Europe and China.
She is the author of In Defence of America, a book arguing the case for supporting the US after the Iraq war; published in the UK and US in 2008. She is an accomplished public speaker and chair of debates, for many kinds of audiences, including financial and military, and for many kinds of events, from after-dinner talks to seminars. She appears frequently on television and radio in the UK and US.
Previously, she was an investment analyst in the City and on Wall Street, and a Director of Kleinwort Benson Securities, now part of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, where she ran its highly-rated team recommending investment in world media stocks.
She has a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from St John’s College, Oxford. She has dual US-British nationality and grew up in London and Washington, DC in a transatlantic family with an American mother and British father. She is a Governor of the Ditchley Foundation, the historic conference centre which fosters transatlantic relations; a Member of the Council (a Trustee) of Chatham House, the foreign affairs think-tank based in London; and a Trustee of the Imperial War Museum.