A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia's War with the West

About the Author

Luke Harding is a journalist, writer and award-winning foreign correspondent with the Guardian. Between 2007 and 2011 he was the Guardian’s bureau chief in Moscow. The Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the Cold War, in part because of his reporting on Alexander Litvinenko’s murder.

He is the author of four previous non-fiction books: The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man; Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia; WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy; and The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken (the last two co-written with David Leigh).

Two have been made into Hollywood movies. Dreamworks’s The Fifth Estate, based on WikiLeaks, was released in 2013. Director Oliver Stone’s biopic of Edward Snowden, adapted from The Snowden Files, is due in 2016. In 2014, Luke was awarded the James Cameron prize. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages.

Luke lives near London with his wife, the freelance journalist Phoebe Taplin, and their two children.