Victor Mallet

Victor Mallet is an author and journalist who has reported and edited for four decades from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, first for Reuters and then for the Financial Times. From 2019 to 2022 he was Paris bureau chief and is now a senior editor on the FT world desk.

His latest book — Far-right France: Le Pen, Bardella and the Future of Europe (Hurst, 2026) — is published in January 2026 and covers the country's political and social turmoil as the far-right Rassemblement National, excluded from power since the second world war, eyes the possible election victories that will win it control of the Élysée presidential palace and the National Assembly. This would have a profound impact on France, its neighbours such as the UK and Germany and the EU and Nato.

His previous book River of Life, River of Death (OUP, 207) looked at India and the environmental crisis afflicting the Ganges, one of the world's great rivers. The Trouble with Tigers (HarperCollins 1999, 2000), described the south-east Asian industrial revolution and the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis.

He twice won the Society of Publishers in Asia award for opinion writing. In India, he was twice awarded the Ramnath Goenka foreign correspondent's award for excellence in journalism — in 2012 for a feature about the rise of Narendra Modi, and in 2015 for a magazine cover story on the Ganges.