Elaine Sciolino is a Paris correspondent and former Paris bureau chief for The New York Times, writing from France since 2002. She writes the Lumière column for The New York Times’ T Magazine.

 In 2010, she was decorated a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, the highest honor of the French state, for her “special contribution” to the friendship between France and the United States.

Her most recent book, La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life, was published by Henry Holt/Times Books in June 2011. The book is in its fifth printing in the United States and was named one of the best books of 2011 by The New York Times’ T Magazine. La séduction, comment les Français jouent au jeu de la vie, the French edition, was published by Presses de la Cité in February 2012. 

She joined The New York Times in 1984, where she has held a number of posts, including United Nations’ bureau chief, Central Intelligence Agency correspondent and chief diplomatic correspondent – the first woman to hold that post.

 Her first book, The Outlaw State: Saddam Hussein’s Quest for Power and the Gulf Crisis, was published by John Wiley & Sons in 1991 and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

 Her next book, Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran, was first published by The Free Press in 2000 and was updated in a new edition in 2005. It was awarded the 2001 New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism and the Overseas Press Club Cornelius Ryan Citation for nonfiction. Sciolino was also honored by Columbia University’s Encyclopedia Iranica project in 2001 “for presenting the best of Iran to the world.”