Sophie Pedder Keynote Speaker

Sophie Pedder is a journalist and author.  She has been the Paris Bureau Chief of The Economist since 2003, covering French and European politics and economics.

Sophie joined The Economist in 1990 and has covered British home affairs, European politics, the global media industry, and the end of apartheid in South Africa as their Johannesburg correspondent in the mid-1990s.  As well as writing for The Economist, she has had articles published in Prospect, Foreign Affairs, the FT, the Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, Paris-Match and Le Figaro, among others. She appears regularly to comment on French politics on CNN, the BBC and other media platforms.

In 2012, Sophie published her first book “Le Déni Français”, a hard-hitting study of the French economy and labour market, which Reuters described as a ‘media phenomenon’. This was followed in 2018 with the publication of “Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation”, in which Sophie examines the first year in office of the young French premiere.

Before working for The Economist Sophie was a research assistant for William Julius Wilson at the University of Chicago’s Urban Poverty and Family Life project.

A graduate of Oxford University and the University of Chicago, she won the David Watt journalism prize in 2006.