FT’s Tett to receive British award

The British Academy, the UK’s national body for the humanities and social sciences, announced Thursday that Gillian Tett, U.S. managing editor of the Financial Times, will be a 2011 recipient of the President’s Medal, an honor that recognizes up to five individuals or organizations for their service to those fields.

The judges commended Tett for her role in predicting the credit crisis in 2006, and then for her authoritative coverage of the events that surrounded it from 2007 to 2009.

A major contribution, they noted, was her deep explanations of financial instruments (such as collateralized debt obligation, credit default swaps and conduits) to “a supposedly informed public that generally had no knowledge of how they worked.” They also point to her use of social anthropology in financial journalism, a unique approach that has led to “a more holistic and prescient understanding of the global economy and financial markets.”

In March 2009 she was named Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards. In June 2009 her book Fool’s Gold won Financial Book of the Year at the inaugural Spear’s Book Awards.

In 2007 she was awarded the Wincott prize, the premier British award for financial journalism, for her capital markets coverage. She was named British Business Journalist of the Year in 2008.

She joined the FT in 1993 and worked in the former Soviet Union and Europe, and in the economics team. In 1997 she was posted to Tokyo where she became the bureau chief, before returning in 2003 to become deputy head of the Lex column.

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