Michael Sullivan
Michael Sullivan is NPR's Senior Asia Correspondent. He moved to Hanoi to open NPR's Southeast Asia Bureau in 2003. Before that, he spent six years as NPR's South Asia correspondent based in but seldom seen in New Delhi.
Michael was in Pakistan on 9-11 and spent much of the next two years there and in Afghanistan covering the run up to and the aftermath of the U.S. military campaign to oust the Taliban and al Qaeda. Michael has also reported extensively on terrorism in Southeast Asia, including both Bali bombings. He also covered the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Michael was the first NPR reporter on the ground in both Thailand and the Indonesian province of Aceh following the devastating December 2004 tsunami. He has returned to Aceh more than half a dozen times since to document the recovery and reconstruction effort. As a reporter in NPR's London bureau in the early 1990s he covered the fall of the Soviet Union, the troubles in Northern Ireland, and the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Before moving to New Delhi, Michael was senior producer on NPR's foreign desk. He has worked in more than 60 countries on five continents, covering conflicts in Somalia, the Balkans, Haiti, Chechnya, and the Middle East. Prior to joining the foreign desk, Michael spent several years as producer and acting executive producer of NPR's All Things Considered.
As a reporter, Michael is the recipient of several Overseas Press Club Awards and Citations for Excellence for stories from Haiti, Afghanistan, and Vietnam. He was also part of the NPR team that won an Alfred I DuPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of 9-11 and the war in Afghanistan. In 2004 he was honored by the South Asia Journalists Association (SAJA) with a Special Recognition Award for his 'outstanding work' from 1998-2003 as NPR's South Asia correspondent.
As a producer and editor, Michael has been honored by the Overseas Press Club for work from Bosnia and Haiti; a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for a story about life in Sarajevo during wartime; and a World Hunger Award for stories from Eritrea.
Michael's wife, Martha Ann Overland, is Southeast Asia correspondent for The Chronicle of Higher Education and also writes commentaries on living abroad for NPR. They have two children.
Michael is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He's been at NPR since 1985.
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The Constitutional Court ordered dissolution of the party, which won elections last year, saying it violated the constitution by proposing to amend the law against defaming the country’s royal family. -
What does the death of the long-serving leader of Vietnam, one of the world's last remaining communist regimes, mean for the country and the region?
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A collision between Philippine and Chinese Coast Guard vessels in the South China Sea earlier this month has again raised fears of an escalation in an area China claims almost entirely as its own.
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Thailand looks set to clamp down on recreational marijuana use, just 18 months after it decriminalized pot, becoming the first country in Asia to do so.
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Myanmar's military is reeling from a string of defeats at the hands of anti-junta forces 3 years after the February 2021 coup. Are the recent opposition successes enough to help topple the regime?
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At least 39 Thai workers were killed and over two dozen more taken hostage in the Hamas attacks on Oct 7. Now, many of them have been released by Hamas since Friday.
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An attack by an alliance of insurgent armies has dealt Myanmar's military a serious setback.
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Thaksin's return coincides with a vote in Parliament Tuesday on the formation of a new government his Pheu Thai party looks set to head. -
A Chinese Coast Guard ship fired a water cannon at a Philippine boat trying to resupply a military outpost on a disputed reef. The incident has heightened tension in a region already on edge.
