Richard Lloyd Parry

Richard Lloyd Parry (born 1969) is a British foreign correspondent and writer. He is the Asia Editor of The Times of London, based in Tokyo, and is the author of the non-fiction books In the Time of Madness and People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman.

In 1995, he became Tokyo correspondent of the British newspaper The Independent and began reporting from other countries in Asia. In 1998 he covered the fall of President Suharto in Indonesia, and the violence which followed the independence referendum in East Timor. In 2002, he moved to The Times. Altogether he has worked in twenty-seven countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, Kosovo and Macedonia.

In April 2003, he was the first to report that the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch, the US soldier reportedly rescued during the war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, was not the heroic story told by the US military, but a staged operation that alarmed patients and the doctors who had struggled to save her life.

In November 2009, he was accused by a group of Thai politicians of the crime of lèse-majesté, or insulting the monarchy, over an interview which he conducted with the deposed Prime Minister of Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra.

In September 2010, he and Davd McNeill of The Independent were briefly arrested in North Korea, after discovering a secret street market in the capital Pyongyang The incident inspired a controversy on the website NK News.

In 2005, he was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year in the UK's What The Papers Say Awards for his coverage of the Indian ocean tsunami and his interview with Tsutomu Yamaguchi, survivor of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.