Robyn Dixon named The Washington Post’s Moscow bureau chief

Dixon joins The Post from the Los Angeles Times Beijing bureau.

Announcement from Foreign Editor Douglas Jehl, Deputy Foreign Editor Eva Rodriguez, and Asia and Russia Editor Brian Murphy:

We are very pleased to announce that Robyn Dixon will join The Washington Post to become our next Moscow bureau chief.

Robyn is a deeply gifted and experienced foreign correspondent whose work for the last 40 years has spanned multiple continents. She is Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, her most recent stop in a career that began in her native Australia and included 16 years covering most of Africa as the L.A. Times bureau chief in Johannesburg.

Robyn also knows Russia, having spent eight years as a correspondent there, first for Australian newspapers and then for the L.A. Times, during the tumultuous years that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. She speaks Russian and has been brushing up on those skills in recent months even while living in China and learning Mandarin.

Robyn’s skill as a storyteller has been recognized with a number of prestigious prizes, including the 2008 Robert F. Kennedy award for international reporting that honored her work from Zimbabwe.

Robyn began her career in 1978 at The Herald Newspaper in Melbourne. She is the mother of a college-age daughter, Sylvia. She will begin work in The Post newsroom in the next month and will take up her new duties in our Moscow bureau once she is granted the necessary accreditation.