Alex Perry is a veteran foreign correspondent who has worked in the emerging markets of Africa, Asia and the Middle East for 15 years, covering business, economics and politics, as well as the occasional war. His third book, The Rift: the Future of Africa, will be published globally in late 2014. He is currently Contributing Editor for Newsweek.
For more than a decade, from postings in Hong Kong, New Delhi and Cape Town, Perry has been a contributor to TIME magazine, for whom he wrote more than 20 cover stories and won numerous awards. He is a frequent guest on the BBC and CNN, is a Media Leader at the Africa chapter of the World Economic Forum, was the host of The Insiders series of South African public debates, organised by Sanlam, and is often asked to appear at literary festivals and other public discussions around the world.
Perry is the author of Falling Off the Edge: Globalisation, World Peace and Other Lies (2008), and Lifeblood: How to Change the World One Dead Mosquito at a Time (2011). His most ambitious book to date, The Rift, draws on seven years living and reporting on the continent to present the definitive account of the new Africa, one that overturns some cherished misperceptions in the West, both among the aid world but also inside the business community. Africa’s rising economic clout, its accompanying reclamation of its political sovereignty, and Africa’s future of simultaneous promise and turmoil, Perry argues, is something we all need to know: Africans are changing not just their own lives but those of us all.
His particular expertise lies in knitting together the diverse issues of Africa and the developing world into a coherent, comprehensive picture. He is at home talking about his encounters with pirates or Islamists as he is relaying insights from conversations with African’s new generation of entrepreneurs and business leaders to figures as diverse as the Dalai Lama, Melinda Gates or Rwandan President Paul Kagame. On the ground when China took off, then India, then Africa, Perry also has an unparalleled first-hand insight into the emerging world, where these key economic regions share similarities and where they differ.
