CLAIRE BERLINSKI WAS born in 1968 in California, and grew up in New York, Seattle and California. She received her undergraduate degree in Modern History and her doctorate in International Relations from Balliol College at Oxford University. She has since lived and worked in Britain, Thailand, Laos, France, and Turkey as a journalist, academic, consultant and freelance writer. Her work has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Sun, the Oxford International Review, Asia Times, the Weekly Standard, the National Review, Policy Review, Azure, Traveler's Tales, Arabies Trends, and numerous anthologies.

She now divides her time between Paris and Istanbul, where she lives with a menagerie of adopted stray animals.