Alex Shoumatoff

Who is Alex Shoumatoff?

Alexander "Alex" Shoumatoff is an American writer known for his literary journalism, nature and environmental writing, and books and magazine pieces about political and environmental situations and world affairs. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine from 1978 to 1987, a founding contributing editor of Outside magazine and Condé Nast Traveler, and is a senior contributing editor to Vanity Fair. He is known for reporting on some of the most remote corners of the world and may be, arguably, the most widely traveled magazine journalist with the broadest range in subject matter writing in English.

He has 10 published books and since 2001 has been the editor of a web site, Dispatches From The Vanishing World devoted to "documenting and raising awareness about the planet's rapidly disappearing natural and cultural diversity", and hundreds of pages of his writing are posted on the site. Career highlights include an article he wrote about the mountain gorilla advocate Dian Fossey, which eventually became the film Gorillas in the Mist, and his arrest in 2008 for trespassing at the Bohemian Grove in Monte Rio, California in 2008 which was featured by Vanity Fair.