Speakers

Tom Parfitt has been a correspondent in Moscow since 2002. He joined the Guardian in 2005 after working initially for the Daily Telegraph. Before moving to Russia he completed an MA in politics at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London. He started his career at the Eastern Daily Press in Norwich. Tom has a particular interest in highland nations such as Albania, Abkhazia and Chechnya. He was awarded a Winston Churchill fellowship in 2001 to spend two months hiking through northern Albania in the footsteps of the Edwardian traveller, Edith Durham. In 2008 he received the Royal Geographical Society's Neville Shulman Challenge Award to undertake a journey through the Caucasus region.