Michael Vatikiotis

Michael Vatikiotis is an American writer, journalist, and private diplomat working in Southeast Asia since 1987. He has been an editor at the Far Eastern Economic Review, he was a Hong Kong–based news magazine correspondent for sixteen years, and he served as the Asian regional director of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, a Geneva-based NGO that facilitates dialogue to resolve armed conflicts. Vatikiotis is a novelist, he writes opinion pieces for international and regional newspapers, and he regularly contributes to Al Jazeera and the BBC.

Education and early career His father was the historian Panayiotis Jerasimof Vatikiotis, and his mother was from a Sephardic Jewish Italian family from Livorno that moved to Egypt in the 19th century. Vatikiotis graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London with a first-class honours degree and then a Doctor of Philosophy at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, in 1984. He studied Southeast Asian history and languages, and his doctoral research was on the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai.

After a period spent as a production trainee with the BBC World Service in London, Vatikiotis served as a producer in Northern Ireland and was then posted to Jakarta as a BBC correspondent in 1987. He joined the Far Eastern Economic Review as Jakarta bureau chief in 1988. He served as bureau chief for the magazine in Kuala Lumpur (1991–1994) and Bangkok (1994–1997). He was also president of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand.

Writing In 1993, Vatikiotis published his first book, Indonesian Politics under Suharto . In 1996, he published Political Change in Southeast Asia: Trimming the Banyan Tree .

His first work of fiction was published in 2001, after he moved to Hong Kong as managing editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review. Debatable Land is a collection of short stories set in Southeast Asia that focus on the region's political transition. As stated in an article in The Wall Street Journal Asia about the work, "Neither fact, nor history, nor entirely fiction, Mr. Vatikiotis's stories dwell in the twilight region between reportage and literature."

In 2004, Vatikiotis published The Spice Garden , a novel set in the eastern Indonesian islands of Maluku. The story follows two friends, a Catholic priest and a Muslim trader, who confront a sudden and terrifying outbreak of religious conflict. Time magazine praised the novel for "evoking the sights and scents of the Tropics, unsparing in its portrayal of the violence of the era". The article added that Vatikiotis is "admirably evenhanded in his attempts to elucidate the social forces that underlay it." later adding, "Vatikiotis is to be praised for bringing this episode to greater public attention and presenting it with skill and sensitivity". while also mentioning that "Mr. Vatikiotis's reporting experience in the region is obvious in the novel's colorful details on local history and urban–rural contrasts."