LUKE HARDING is a journalist, writer and award-winning foreign correspondent with the Guardian. He has reported from Delhi, Berlin and Moscow and covered wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Between 2007 and 2011 he was the Guardian’s Moscow bureau chief; the Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the cold war.
He is the author of three previous non-fiction books. They are The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken, nominated for the Orwell Prize; and WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, both written with David Leigh. Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia appeared in 2011. His books have been translated into 13 languages.
Luke lives in Hertfordshire with his wife, the freelance journalist Phoebe Taplin, and their two children.