Valerie Hopkins is the South-East Europe correspondent for the Financial Times, covering Hungary, Romania, Albania and the former Yugoslavia. Before joining the FT in Budapest, Valerie lived and worked extensively in the Balkans as a freelancer as well as with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Politico, Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera, the Guardian, and elsewhere. She has a Master of Arts in Political Journalism from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where her M.A. thesis, a long-form magazine article about female war criminals from Bosnia, won runner up for the best thesis. Valerie holds a B.A. in International Relations (with a focus on Russian and Post-Soviet Studies) from the College of William and Mary, where she served as student body president. She speaks Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian, Russian, Albanian and is currently attempting Hungarian.
