Richard Lloyd Parry

Richard Lloyd Parry is a British journalist and author born in 1966. He has been Asia Editor and Tokyo Bureau Chief of The Times for over twenty years and has covered wars, disasters, and politics across Asia. He is the author of People Who Eat Darkness (2011), an account of the murder of a young British woman in Tokyo that won several nonfiction awards. Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone (2017, MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is his account of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that killed nearly twenty thousand people, focusing on the Okawa Elementary School where seventy-four children and ten teachers died despite a twelve-minute warning. Drawing on years of interviews with bereaved parents and survivors, Parry reconstructs the disaster with narrative intimacy and moral precision. It won the Rathbones Folio Prize in 2018 and the Bayeux Calvados Normandy Award for War Correspondents. Parry lives in Tokyo with his family and writes extensively about Japanese society and culture.