John F. Burns

chief, New York Times bureau, New Delhi

John F. Burns became chief of The New York Times bureau in New Delhi in 1994. He was previously based in Sarajevo and, before that, Belgrade. In 1993 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for courageous coverage of the strife and destruction in Bosnia. Mr. Burns was bureau chief in Toronto from 1987 to 1991. From 1984 to 1987, he served as chief of the Peking bureau. In July 1986, he was incarcerated by the Chinese Government for six days on charges of espionage. After an investigation, all charges were dropped, but he was expelled from the country. From 1981 to 1984, Mr. Burns was bureau chief in Moscow. Between 1976 and 1981, he was assigned to the Johannesburg bureau. In 1979, Mr. Burns and two other Times correspondents shared the George Polk Award for their reporting from Africa. Mr. Burns joined The Times in 1975 after covering the life and politics of mainland China from his base in Beijing from 1971 to 1975 for The Toronto Globe and Mail. Before that he was a local and parliamentary reporter for The Globe and Mail. Mr. Burns was born on Oct. 4, 1944, in Nottingham, England. His family moved to Canada when he was a boy, and he was educated at McGill University in Montreal. In 1980 and 1981 he studied Russian at Harvard, and in 1984 he studied Chinese at Cambridge University. He also speaks French and German. He is married to Jane Scott-Long; they have two sons and a daughter.