Eric Ellis has been a staff foreign correspondent for Time, the Australian Financial Review, the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age. He has written for Fortune, Euromoney, Forbes and the Financial Times, The Times, The Bulletin/Newsweek, The Spectator, El Mundo, CNN, Reuters, Institutional Investor and the International Herald Tribune.

Primarily focussed on East and S-E Asia, he has also reported extensively from South Asia, the Middle East and Europe. His extended coverage of the terror bombings in Bali over 2002-03 won him the 2003 Walkley Award for Excellence in Journalism. He was a finalist for the 2006 Walkley Award for an investigative series from Poland and was also a finalist in the 1993 Walkley Awards for his reporting from China. In 2005 was short-listed for the 2005 British Business Journalist of the Year Awards for reporting from Afghanistan, where he had tracked its post 9-11 development. He was a finalist in the 2005 South Asian Journalists Association of North America awards for his reporting of the Sri Lankan tsunami for Fortune. He also covered that country’s civil war. In May 2007, an extensive profile he prepared of the businesswoman Wendi Deng attracted international media attention.

Since 2010, he has reported extensively across Europe from bases in Amsterdam, southern Spain and Portugal, while continuing to work widely across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

He has interviewed 17 presidents, prime ministers and heads of state; Karzai of Afghanistan, Yudhoyono of Indonesia, Ponta of Romania, Chandrika and Rajapakse of Sri Lanka, Musharraf and Aziz of Pakistan, Ramos of The Philippines, Malaysia’s Mahathir and Badawi, Singapore’s Goh and Lee, HK Governor Patten, Frei of Chile, Alkatiri and Ramos-Horta of East Timor and Abhisit and Chuan of Thailand. He has also interviewed and profiled numerous finance ministers and central bank governors.

From 2001-2008, he served as S-E Asia correspondent for Fortune Magazine, and Asia Correspondent for The Bulletin, from Singapore and Jakarta.

In 1999, he was appointed the regional correspondent of Time Magazine, based in Singapore, and covering regional economic and political topics, such as the emergence of the Internet in Asia, of independence in East Timor and Indonesia’s post-crisis political reform process.

In 1996, he was posted to the United States as correspondent with Australia’s influential daily newspaper – the Australian Financial Review (AFR) – based in Los Angeles and San Francisco and covering Corporate Hollywood, U.S politics and society, the emergence of the internet and information technology and the resultant transformation of the U.S economy.

In 1993, he was posted to Hong Kong as the AFR’S Asia Correspondent, covering regional business, economic and political affairs with particular emphasis on emerging China. He made a rare visit to North Korea after the 1994 death of Kim Il Sung, tracked Asia’s overseas Chinese communities, post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and the embrace of capitalism in Vietnam, Mongolia and the Russian Far East.

From 1990-93, he was a correspondent in the Sydney Morning Herald’s European bureau in London, with assignments as diverse of the emergence of democracy in post-communist Eastern Europe, Spain’s 1992 “Year of Wonders” and a profile of Private Eye magazine. Notable exclusives during this time included being the first journalist to locate the fraudster Christopher Skase in Mallorca; a rare interview with Sydney Opera House designer Jorn Utzon, and with the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, and meeting bombers of the Basque separatist group ETA.

From 1986-89, he was the SMH correspondent in Hong Kong from 1986, covering corporate and political affairs in Hong Kong and China, including the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing, the 1988 conviction on corruption charges of HK stock exchange chairman Ronald Li and the implications of the Sino-British treaty on Hong Kong’s future.

In February 2008, he served as an official observer of the Pakistan general elections.

He has visited more than 70 countries, reporting from more than 40. He has studied Mandarin, Spanish and Portuguese, albeit all imperfectly.