About David Ignatius
David Ignatius came to The Washington Post in January 1986 after spending ten years as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He started with the Journal in Pittsburgh, where he covered the United Steelworkers Union and the steel industry; David then moved to Washington, where he covered the Justice Department and the CIA and, briefly, the U.S. Senate; then overseas as the Journal’s Middle East Correspondent; then back to Washington as chief diplomatic correspondent. While serving in this last job in 1985, David won the Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting.
David came to The Washington Post as editor of the Sunday Outlook section and stayed in that job for four years before becoming Foreign Editor in June 1990, just before Iraq invaded Kuwait. He became the Assistant Managing Editor of Business in January, 1993.
Born in Cambridge, MA in 1950 but raised mostly in Washington. Graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1973, then received a Frank Knox Fellowship from Harvard and went to King’s College, Cambridge, where he received a diploma in economics in 1975. First job after school was as an editor of The Washington Monthly magazine, and has written extensively for magazines, including The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic.
Has written five novels: Agents of Innocence, published in 1987 by W.W. Norton, SIRO, published in 1991 by Farrar Strauss & Giroux, The Bank of Fear, published in 1994 by William Morrow, A Firing Offense, published in 1997 by Random House, and The Sun King, published in 1999 by Random House. Lives in Washington with wife and three daughters.