Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma was born on December 28th, 1951 and is currently 73 years old. Ian Buruma was born in The Hague, Netherlands. Buruma attended Leiden University where he received a Candidate degree in Chinese literature and history. Ian also attended College of Art (Nichidai Geijutsu Gakko) of the Nihon University.

Ian Buruma is a distinguished cultural critic, historian, and writer known for his work on cultural and political topics, particularly those about the West and Asia.

During the 1970s, Ian Buruma made his home in Tokyo, where he got into performing arts as he worked with Maro Akaji’s butoh dance troup and in avant-garde theater with Kara Juro. Thereafter, he moved into photography and documentary filmmaking.

During the 1980s, Buruma travelled extensively across Asia as a journalist as he was a reporter for major publications. During this time, he was a Foreign Editor of The Spectator and worked at The Far Eastern Economic Review as its Cultural Editor.

Over the years, his analyses and essays have been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. He has also worked with several outlets in Europe, such as NRC Handelsblad and Corriere della Sera.

Buruma has also worked in academia, where he was employed at prestigious institutions such as the Berlin-based Wissenschaftskolleg, Oxford, Harvard, and Princeton. He is also a Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism, Human Rights, and Democracy at the New York-based Bard College.

For his work in Asia, he is a winner of the Shreinstein Journalism Award, and for his contributions to European Culture, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize in 2008. He has also received recognition as one of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals in the world.

Between 2011 and 2012, he had a fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center in addition to working at Project Syndicate, where he wrote monthly columns.

In 1991, Ian Buruma published Playing the Game, a fictionalized biography of Indian cricketer Ranjitsinjki, who became a very popular figure in England during the Edward times.

Ranji is a man who is both isolated and celebrated as he is an embodiment of the contradictions of an imperial subject estranged from it yet elevated in British society.

In Ian Buruma’s The China Lover, the author traces the life of Japanese singer and actress Yamaguschi Yoshiko, who had several identities depending on the culture she lived in.

Three men enthralled by her legacy and image cannot get enough of her, and Buruma uses their perspectives as she combines narration and cultural insight to explore themes of illusion, nationalism, and identity in Shanghai during the Second World War.

Ian Buruma also published a nonfiction work, Year Zero, in 2013. The work explores the transformations the world had to deal with following the end of World War II.

He examines the moral complexities of reeducation and justice, the suffering of displaced populations, and the destruction of cities. Buruma also highlights the hope and brutality of the times, including decolonization and the rise of the European Union and the United Nations.

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Ian Buruma: F.A.Q