Tom Parfitt studied Russian politics and language at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London and lived in Moscow for twenty years, working as a correspondent for The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Times.
During his two decades in Moscow, Tom reported on dozens of occasions from Chechnya and the wider North Caucasus. In 2008, he received the Royal Geographical Society’s Neville Shulman Award to complete a one thousand mile walk from the Black Sea to the Caspian across the northern flanks of the Greater Caucasus mountains - the journey which forms the backbone of his book, High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia’s Haunted Hinterland, published by Headline in 2023.
Tom was a residential public policy scholar for six months in 2010 at the Woodrow Wilson Centre, a think-tank in Washington, DC. He studied the causes of the Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus.
Tom has also written for The Spectator, The Sunday Times magazine, Details magazine (US), The Boston Globe (US) and New Left Review, and is a former Knight Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan.
In 2022, Tom began a PhD in Creative Non-Fiction at Bath Spa University. His writing will examine the impact of the climate crisis and other environmental threats on Russia’s taiga and its inhabitants, both human and non-human. He hopes that a popular book about the boreal forest will result.
Agent: Patrick Walsh
