Ian Buruma was educated in Holland and Japan, where he studied history, Chinese literature, and Japanese cinema.
In the 1980s, he worked as a journalist, and spent much of his early writing career travelling and reporting from all over Asia.
Buruma now writes about a broad range of political and cultural subjects for major publications, most frequently for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Corriere della Sera, and NRC Handelsblad.
He was voted as one of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals by the Foreign Policy/Prospect magazines in 2008, and in 2010.