Richard Read covers international business for The Oregonian, the largest newspaper in the Pacific Northwest.

Read, 41, became the first foreign correspondent for a Northwest newspaper when he founded The Oregonian's Asia Bureau in Tokyo in 1989. Based in Japan, he reported throughout Asia during the Pacific Rim's economic take-off, covering business, politics and lifestyles and writing a Sunday column. He reported on the war in Cambodia, change in China, conditions in North Korea and the opening of Vietnam and the Russian Far East.

Read served as first vice president, secretary and first director of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan. He returned to the newsroom in Portland in 1994. He has continued to travel and report in Asia, Latin America and Europe since then, in assignments ranging from the uprising in Chiapas, Mexico to the handover of Hong Kong to China.

In 1996, Read was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. In 1997, Read spent a month reporting in Peru on an Eisenhower Exchange Fellowship.

Read graduated from Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1980 with a B.A. in English literature. In 1986, after five years of reporting, he was awarded a Henry R. Luce Foundation fellowship, under which he worked for a year as a staff writer for The Nation newspaper of Bangkok, Thailand. He moved to Tokyo in 1987 and free-lanced for publications including The New York Times, World Monitor, Euromoney and the Yomiuri newspaper.

A U.S. citizen born in St. Andrews, Scotland, Read was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is married to Kim Kunkle. They have a daughter, Nehalem.