Bill Emmott keynote speaker

Bill Emmott is an independent writer and consultant on international affairs. He was Editor of The Economist, the world’s leading weekly magazine on current affairs and business, from 1993 until 2006, having worked for that publication since 1980. The author of 13 books, on Japan, Asia, Italy and the 20^th century, his latest have been “The Fate of the West: The Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea”, published in 2017; and “Japan’s Far More Female Future”, which was published first in Japanese by Nikkei in July 2019 and was published in English by Oxford University Press in September 2020.

Now he is an Ushioda Fellow at Tokyo College, University of Tokyo as well as a member of UTokyo’s Global Advisory Board; chairman of the board of Trinity College Dublin’s Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute; chairman of the Japan Society of the UK; chairman of the trustees of the International Institute for Strategic Studies; chairman of Trade Advisers Ltd, an Irish consultancy and provider of education and training; and a member of the Comitato Scientifico of the Centro Einaudi in Turin. He is the co-founder and co-director, with Berel Rodal, of the  Global Commission for Post-Pandemic Policy, an independent, non-partisan, high-level group dedicated to making recommendations about how societies can be made more resilient in the wake of the pandemic-related crises that began in 2020.

In 2016 the Japanese government awarded him the “Order of the Rising Sun: Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon” for services to UK-Japan relations.

Bill writes regular columns on international affairs for La Stampa and Avanti! in Italy, Nikkei Business and Mainichi Shimbun in Japan, and Project Syndicate, and has also written for The Times, The Guardian, Prospect and the Financial Times in Britain.

In 2003, Bill was chosen by a jury of senior Italian journalists as the winner of the “È giornalismo” (“This is journalism”) award, the first time a foreigner had been given this prestigious Italian journalism prize. In 2006-07, Bill received four journalism awards in Britain: a special award from the Wincott Foundation; the “business journalist of the year” award from the London Press Club; the “decade of excellence” award from the World Leadership Forum’s business journalism awards programme; and a “lifetime achievement” award from the Work Foundation. In 2009 he received the Gerald Loeb “lifetime achievement” award, a prestigious American business journalism awards programme organised by the Anderson School of Management at UCLA.

Bill was a member of the advisory board of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in 2016-2018; a member of Swiss Re’s Panel of Advisors in 2006-19. He is now a member of the Global Advisory Board of the University of Tokyo and a member of the senior advisory panel of Critical Resource, a consultancy.

He has honorary degrees from Warwick and City universities in Britain and Northwestern University in America, and is an honorary fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He was a Visiting Fellow in Practice at the Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford in 2015-17 and was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford in 2017-18.

Bill is married to Carol. They live in Dublin and Oxford with their three dogs.