Rukmini Callimachi

Rukmini Callimachi joined the New York Times in March 2014 as a foreign
correspondent, covering al-Qaeda and Islamic extremism. She is a two-time Pulitzer
Prize finalist, most recently in 2014 for her series of stories based on a cache of internal
al-Qaeda documents she discovered in Mali. She is also the winner of multiple Overseas
Press Club Awards and the Michael Kelly prize.
Before joining the Times, she spent 7 years covering a 20-country beat in Africa, first as
a correspondent and later as West Africa bureau chief for The Associated Press. She
began her career as a freelancer in India in 2001, where she was lucky enough to get one
of the last seats on a plane to the state of Gujarat on the day of a catastrophic earthquake,
filing her first story for TIME magazine.
Originally from Romania, Callimachi grew up in Bucharest, Lausanne, Switzerland and
Ojai, California.

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