Kourosh Ziabari is an award-winning Iranian journalist, writer and media correspondent. He is the recipient of a Chevening Award from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and works with the Hong Kong-headquartered Asia Times as a correspondent.

Kourosh is the recipient of the Professional Excellence Award from the Foreign Press Correspondents Association (AFPC). He is also the silver medal winner of the Prince Albert II of Monaco and United Nations Correspondents Association’s Global Prize for Coverage of Climate Change.

In 2022, he was selected as one of the eight awardees of the World Press Institute fellowship sponsored by the University of St. Thomas. He was the program’s first Iranian fellow since 1979. Later in the year, he covered the United Nations General Assembly on a Dag Hammarskjold Fund for Journalists fellowship.

Kourosh was born on April 27, 1990, in the northern Iranian city of Rasht. Having practiced journalism since a very young age, he started his career with the local Hatef weekly magazine in early 2000s. By the time he was a high school student, his writings had been featured by most of the nationally-circulated dailies in Iran. Between 2007-2012, he was a regular contributor to Daneshmand magazine, Iran’s oldest popular science magazine.

Articles and interviews by Kourosh Ziabari have appeared in a variety of international publications including Foreign PolicyAl-Monitor, The National InterestMiddle East Eye, The New Arab, TRT World, PassBlue, Democracy in Exile, Middle East Institute, Arab Center Washington DC, Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, Responsible StatecraftopenDemocracy, The Huffington Post, Fair Observer, LobelogInternational Policy DigestYour Middle EastAl-Arabiya, Eurasia Review, Truth Out, Silvia CattoriVoltaire NetworkOnline Opinion, Counter Punch, Istanbul Literary Review, Turkish Weekly Journal, Ovi Magazine, Arab News, The Nation (Pakistan)Foreign Policy In FocusMedia Monitors, Arab OnlineQW Magazine, and many others.

Kouosh has worked with Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations as an Iran and Middle East analyst. He is also an elected individual member of Chatham House: The Royal Institute of International Affairs. As a speaker, he has addressed such venues as the Concordia Summit, Cambridge Union and Goldsmiths, University of London.

Kourosh has interviewed several prominent world leaders, politicians, diplomats, academicians, media personalities and writers including Heinz Fischer, Armen Sarkissian, Aleksander Kwasniewski, Kjell Magne Bondevik, James A MichelMassimo D’Alema, Gediminas Kirkilas, Jose Ramos-Horta, F. W. de Klerk, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Mario Soares, Vicente Fox, Carl Bildt, Edgars Rinkevics, Erhard Busek, Ahmad Alhendawi, Ramesh ThakurHans Blix, Ana Palacio, Evangelos Venizelos, Jean Asselborn, Steve AdlerMogens Lykketoft, Didier Reynders, Massimo Bray, Emma Bonino, Keit Pentus-Rosimannus, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, Miroslav Lajcak, Ivaylo Kalfin, Samuel Zbogar, Theodoros Pangalos, Jon Baldvin Hannibalsson, Jutta Urpilainen, Georgios Iacovou, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, Janko Veber, Jack Straw, Richard Bacon, John W. Ashe, Frank N. von Hippel, Lawrence Korb, Ronald E. Neumann, Admiral James Stavridis, Richard Falk, Denis Halliday, Ilan Pappe, Francesc Vendrell, Chandra Muzaffar, Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, Zygmunt Bauman, Glenn Greenwald, Francis Boyle, Henry Giroux, Edmund Phelps, Olli Heinonen, Dave Lindorff, Viviane Reding, Senator Richard H. Black, Jim SlatteryAmb. Frank Wisner, Amb. Akbar Ahmed, Amb. Robert E. Hunter, Amb. William Green Miller, Sami Yusuf, Juan Cole, Kristalina Georgieva, James Petras, Amb. Thomas R. Pickering, John Mearsheimer, Michael Parenti, Lawrence Wilkerson, Pierre Goldschmidt, Mike Gravel, Kenneth O’Keefe, Pepe Escobar, Jean Bricmont, David Barsamian, Michael Behe, Coleen Rowley, Gary Sick, Stephen Walt, Deepa Kumar, Charles Eisenstein, General Mirza Aslam Beg, Marjorie Cohn, Paolo Cotta-Ramusino, John Tirman, Sheldon Richman, Diana Johnstone, Thierry Meyssan, Yvonne Ridley, Vernon L. Smith, Ruprecht Polenz, Richard Foltz, Vijay Prashad, Deepak Tripathi, Keith LockeWilliam BeemanNoam Chomsky, Peter Singer, Stephen Kinzer, Ted Rall, Eric Margolis, Linh Dinh, Carlos Latuff, Paul R. Pillar, Pastor Terry Jones, Stephen Zunes, Gareth Porter, Alain de Botton, Erri De Luca, Gilad Atzmon, Andre Vletchek, Harun Yahya, Christofer Bollyn, Fredrick Toben, Alexander Stille, Antony LoewensteinSid Ganis, Alan Hart, David Ray Griffin, James H. Fetzer, Wayne Madsen, and Paul Craig Roberts.

Kourosh has conducted exclusive interviews with distinguished global scholars and has arranged interviews with more than 30 Nobel Prize laureates in physics, chemistry, medicine, economics and peace including Robin Warren, Anthony James Leggett, Heinrich Rohrer, Antony Hewish, Kurt Wutrich, David Gross, Richard Ernst, George Olah, Wolfgang Ketterle, Brian Kobilka, Frank Wilczek and Douglas Osheroff. These interviews received widespread attention in Iran’s scientific community as an innovative initiative.

In 2009, Kourosh was selected to represent the students of the Middle East in the International Student Energy Summit in Calgary, Canada. He was named a member of the student assembly and attended the summit where he had he opportunity to do an interview with the former Mexican President Vicente Fox. The same year, his paper was accepted for presentation at the VIII Annual Worldwide Forum on Education and Culture in Rome, Italy. He also received a bursary to attend the 18th International Youth Leadership Conference which was held from July 19th to 24th in Prague, Czech Republic. In December 2009, he was admitted as an official delegate to take part in the 5th World Youth Congress held in Istanbul, Turkey the following year.

He has won the first prize of the 18th edition of Iran’s National Press Festival in the category of political articles in 2011. A year earlier, he had won the third prize of the same festival in the category of interviews. In 2010, he was selected as the top researcher of the year at the University of Guilan where he graduated in English Language and Literature.

In June 2015, Kourosh was selected by Deutsche Welle and European Youth Press from among 600 applicants for a fellowship program to cover the Global Media Forum 2015 in Bonn. He was part of a team of 16 young international journalists from different countries, namely Armenia, Brazil, Cambodia, Congo, Estonia, France, Georgia, Moldova, Morocco, the Philippines, Palestine, Poland, South Africa and Ukraine who received a grant to travel to Germany and produce the special edition of Orange Magazine. The theme of the 2015 forum was “Media and Foreign Policy in the Digital Age.”

Kourosh has been the recipient of the Senior Journalists Seminar 2015 fellowship awarded to him by the East-West Center. This fellowship took 16 journalists from the Asian and Arab countries and the United States to Malaysia and Pakistan as well as three U.S. cities of Washington D.C., Nashville and Honolulu in a 21-day traveling and reporting program from August 18 to September 10 to explore the venues for the promotion of relations between the United States and Muslim world and bridging the gaps between them.

In November 2015, Kourosh was awarded the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Fellowship in Cultural Journalism by the FNPI foundation and the Colombian Ministry of Culture and traveled to the Bolivar Department north of Colombia, reporting on the cultural and historical magnets of the cities of Cartagena de Indias and Santa Cruz de Mompox. The fellowship brought together 15 international fellows for two weeks of field reporting, writing, discussion and traveling in the Caribbean country.

In April 2016, Kourosh was selected from among hundreds of applicants to take part in the American Middle Eastern Network for Dialog at Stanford (AMENDS). He gave a talk at the summit discussing his ambitions for better Iran-U.S. relations after decades of tumultuous, antagonistic relations.

In November 2016, he participated in and covered the World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg on a fellowship by the Council of Europe.

Kourosh has received two certificates of nomination for the Kent Student Awards 2017, presented by the then Vice-Chancellor of the University of Kent Prof Dame Julia Mary Goodfellow. In October 2018, he was named the Journalist of the Month by the International Journalists Network.

In May 2018, Kourosh was selected by the Heinrich Boll Foundation to participate in the Congress of Young Europeans in Prague, Czech Republic. He was one of the 70 young delegates selected from among 200 applicants to take part in the event held in August-September 2018. He has also reported on fellowships by the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Baku, Republic of Azerbaijan, and Changsha, China.

In 2020, he was named a finalist of the local reporter category of the Kurt Schork Awards in International Journalism sponsored by the Kurt Schork Memorial Fund and the Thomson Reuters Foundation. In 2021, he received his second nomination from the awards after being shortlisted as a finalist of the local reporter category. He was shortlisted as the finalist in the best freelancer category of the Kurt Schork awards in 2022.

As an expert and commentator on Iran and the Middle East, Kourosh has been interviewed by Drivetime, a popular radio station Cape Town, The World Weekly, BBC World Service, The Media Line, Russia Today, PBS Mediashift, Popular Discourse and Radio Voice of Russia.

His work of journalism has been cited in several books and academic journals, including the 2017 book “The Bitter Taste of Hope: Ideals, Ideologies and Interests in the Age of Obama” by Prof Stephen Eric Bronner.

He is married to Zahra Kazemi, a graduate of English language and literature. They met while they were studying English language at the University of Guilan.

In the afternoon of Sunday, April 20, 2014, a turning point emerged in the personal life of Kourosh, and his daughter, Termeh opened her eyes to this world. Kourosh hopes that Termeh will one day become a great scholar, journalist or scientist!