Jonathan Lyons
Journalist

The Society For Useful Knowledge:
Benjamin Franklin and the Birth of the Practical Nation
Bloomsbury Press, 2013

The House of Wisdom:
How the Arabs Trabsformed Western Civilization
Bloomsbury Press, 2008

Answering Only to God:
Faith and Freedom in 21st-Century Iran, co-authored with Geneive Abdo
Henry Holt, 2003

Author and journalist Jonathan Lyons has spent his professional and personal life exploring the shifting boundaries between East and West. After more than twenty years as an editor and foreign correspondent for Reuters, much of it in the Islamic world, he is now affiliated with the Global Terrorism Research Centre and is completing his doctorate in sociology of religion, both at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He lives in Washington, DC.

In the late 1980s, Lyons moved to Turkey where he was Reuters' bureau chief for four and a half years. In 1998, Lyons moved to Tehran and reopened the Reuters bureau, which had been closed by the authorities thirteen years earlier. He then worked for five years in Reuters' Washington office, before taking up his last foreign assignment in Jakarta in 2006 covering radical Islamic movements across Southeast Asia.

He has a BA with Honours in Russian and History from Wesleyan university and was a Fellow at Columbia University's Harriman Institute of Soviet Studies. He also studied at the Pushkin Institute of Russian language in Moscow.