Lucy Hornby

Lucy Hornby is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has covered a wide-ranging set of topics in China for the Financial Times and Reuters. She has reported from every Chinese province and region.

Lucy got her start in journalism with the newswires. She reported on the energy industry in Southeast Asia for Dow Jones, and on Latin America for Energy Intelligence. At Reuters in Shanghai and then in Beijing, she moved from the commodity markets to agricultural and industrial policy, and then to general news and economics. She covered the 2008 Olympics, the Sichuan earthquake, unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang, the float of the renminbi, trade talks, North Korea, and the National People's Congress. She also reported from Mongolia.

As deputy bureau chief in Beijing for the Financial Times, Lucy covered trade negotiations, society and politics. She conceived a fascination for the byzantine mechanics of shadow banking and ran investigations into the ownership and financing of some of China's largest and most indebted conglomerates. Her investigations (together with a team of FT journalists) into the ownership and financing of airline-to-finance conglomerate HNA won the 2018 Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) award for excellence in business reporting.

Lucy lived in China for two decades, arriving in the country in 1995 to teach English in Wuhan through the Princeton-in-Asia program. She is a graduate of Princeton University, and speaks Mandarin Chinese and French.

Lucy returned to the United States in 2019 for the Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard. She served as a visiting fellow at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies from 2021–23 and is currently a non-resident Senior Associate with the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Her first book, The Last Man: A Biography of Xi Jinping, will be published on March 2, 2027 by St. Martin's Press.