Tony Barber is a writer specialising in European current affairs and modern history. He is currently working on a book project on the communist era in east-central Europe.
Tony was an editor, columnist and foreign correspondent at the Financial Times from 1997 to April 2025. He was based in Frankfurt (1998-2002), Rome (2002-2007) and Brussels (2007-2010). He was Europe Editor from 2010 to 2018, and European Comment Editor from 2018 to April 2025.
Tony started his career at Reuters news agency in 1981 and served as a correspondent in New York, Washington and Chicago (1982-1983), Vienna (1983), Warsaw (1984-1985), Moscow (1985-1987), Washington (1987-1988) and Belgrade (1989). From 1990 to 1997 Tony was East Europe Editor, then Europe Editor, at The Independent newspaper in London.
Tony wrote the introduction to the Polish author Margo Rejmer’s book “Mud Sweeter Than Honey”, a study of Albanian communism.
In 2012 Tony was awarded the Medal of Gratitude by the Solidarity Centre in Gdansk in recognition of his work in support of freedom and democracy in Poland in the 1980s.
Among the major world events on which he reported on the ground were the 1986 Chernobyl accident, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the fall of eastern European communism in 1989, the 1991-1995 wars of the Yugoslav succession, the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005, the post-2008 banking sector and eurozone debt emergency, and the 2017 Catalonian separatist crisis in Spain.
Tony is the author of a poetry book, “Our Hearts’ Desire and other poems”.
Tony studied from 1978 to 1981 at St John’s College, University of Oxford, where he received a BA First Class Honours degree in Modern History. He was born in 1960 in London.