Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Rajiv Chandrasekaran is a senior correspondent and associate editor of The Washington Post, focusing on the U.S. effort to stabilize Afghanistan. Author of Green Zone, Chandrasekaran is an accomplished speaker who appears regularly on CNN, MSNBC, and National Public Radio. Read Full BiographyAbout Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Rajiv Chandrasekaran is a senior correspondent and associate editor of The Washington Post. His reporting and writing is focused on the U.S. effort to stabilize Afghanistan, and he travels there frequently to meet with Afghans and Americans involved in counterinsurgency operations and reconstruction programs.
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. 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. 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 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 book award, the Ron Ridenhour Prize and Britain’s Samuel Johnson Prize. It was named one of the “10 Best Books of 2007″ by the New York Times. It also was a finalist for the National Book Award and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. The book has been adapted into a major motion picture starring Matt Damon and directed by Paul Greengrass, which was released in March 2010.
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 for Advanced International Studies in Washington and as a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington.
Chandrasekaran appears regularly on CNN, MSNBC 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.
