Catalog

Adam LeBor

Adam LeBor is a British author, journalist, writing coach and editorial trainer. Born in London, he worked as a foreign correspondent from 1991 for many years, mainly covering Hungary, central Europe and the Balkans for newspapers including ''The Times,'' the ''Independent'' and the ''Economist''. LeBor has also lived in Berlin and Paris and spent substantial amounts of time reporting from the former Yugoslavia. He covered the collapse of Communism and the Yugoslav wars for ''The Independent ''and ''The Times'' and has worked in more than thirty countries, some of which inspired his book writing.

He currently contributes to ''The Times,'' the ''Financial Times'', where he reviews thrillers, ''The Critic'', ''Monocle'' and several other publications. He works as an editorial trainer and writing coach for Economist Education, the ''Financial Times, Citywire'' and ''Monocle'' and is a former contributor to ''Harry's Place''.

LeBor has written nine non-fiction books, including ''Hitler's Secret Bankers'', which exposed Swiss complicity with the Nazis and which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, a biography of Slobodan Milosevic and ''City of Oranges'', an account of Jewish and Arab families in Jaffa, which was shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly Prize. His books have been published in fourteen languages including Chinese, Hebrew and Japanese. His most recent work is ''The Last Days of Budapest'', the first English-language history of the Hungarian capital during the Second World War. Published in early 2025, the book received high praise and was Book of the Week in ''The Times'' in January 2025. ''Tower of Basel'', his 2013 investigative history of the Bank for International Settlements, will be republished in an updated edition in late 2025.

As well as non-fiction, LeBor has written two critically-acclaimed crime and thriller trilogies, which draw on and were partly inspired by his journalism. The Danube Blues trilogy - ''District VIII, Kossuth Square'' and ''Dohany Street'' - features Balthazar Kovacs, a Roma cop in the Budapest murder squad. The first two volumes unfold in Budapest during the refugee crisis of 2015 and 2016 when the city was a staging post for tens of thousands of migrants journeying to Austria and Germany. The third, ''Dohany Street'', also takes place in Budapest but deals with themes of Holocaust justice and restitution.

The Yael Azoulay United Nations thriller trilogy partly draws on LeBor's work as a reporter in the former Yugoslavia during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s and his experiences with United Nations peacekeepers. Azoulay is a former Israeli intelligence operative, now working as the special envoy for the UN Secretary General, cutting deals behind the scenes. The series is global in its settings, with storylines that roam from Congo to Iran, Iceland and Manhattan, as Yael also delves into her own past and her family's links to a shadowy private intelligence organisation.

LeBor's first thriller, ''The Budapest Protocol'', was partly inspired by his own experience as a foreign correspondent in Budapest and also by the Red House Report, a 1944 US intelligence report about Nazi plans for post-war Europe (see below section). Provided by Wikipedia