Pilar Bonet Cardona (born 1952) is a Spanish journalist who has spent most of her professional career as a correspondent for the newspaper ''

El País ''El País'' (; ) is a Spanish-language daily newspaper in Spain. ''El País'' is based in the capital city of Madrid and it is owned by the Spanish media conglomerate PRISA. It is the second most circulated daily newspaper in Spain . ''El Pa ...

'' in Moscow.

Career

With a licentiate in Hispanic Philology from the

University of Barcelona The University of Barcelona ( ca, Universitat de Barcelona, UB; ; es, link=no, Universidad de Barcelona) is a public university located in the city of Barcelona, Catalonia, in Spain. With 63,000 students, it is one of the biggest universities i ...

and in Information Sciences from the

Autonomous University of Barcelona The Autonomous University of Barcelona ( ca, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; , es, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona; UAB), is a public university mostly located in Cerdanyola del Vallès, near the city of Barcelona in Catalonia, Spain. ...

, Pilar Bonet completed her training with the study of English, German, and Russian. She started working as a journalist in different media of the

Balearic Islands The Balearic Islands ( es, Islas Baleares ; or ca, Illes Balears ) are an archipelago in the Balearic Sea, near the eastern coast of the Iberian Peninsula. The archipelago is an autonomous community and a province of Spain; its capital is ...

, later going to ''

El Periódico de Catalunya ''El Periódico de Catalunya'' (, ), also simply known as ''El Periódico'', is a morning daily newspaper based in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. The paper publishes separate daily editions in Spanish and in Catalan. The two editions combined sell ...

''. The

EFE agency Agencia EFE, S.A. () is a Spanish international news agency, the major multimedia news agency in Spanish language and the world's fourth largest wire service after the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse. EFE was created in 193 ...

hired her as a correspondent at its headquarters in Vienna, a place from which, in the 1970s and 1980s, the news of

Eastern Bloc The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc and the Soviet Bloc, was the group of socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America under the influence of the Soviet Union that existed du ...

countries was covered. After two years at EFE, in 1982 she was hired by ''

'' to be the paper's new head correspondent in the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...

, based in Moscow. In the following fifteen years she remained in the same location, covering the emergence and rise of the Polish trade union

Solidarity ''Solidarity'' is an awareness of shared interests, objectives, standards, and sympathies creating a psychological sense of unity of groups or classes. It is based on class collaboration.''Merriam Webster'', http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictio ...

, the

fall of the Berlin Wall The fall of the Berlin Wall (german: Mauerfall) on 9 November 1989, during the Peaceful Revolution, was a pivotal event in world history which marked the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the figurative Iron Curtain and one of the series of eve ...

and

German reunification German reunification (german: link=no, Deutsche Wiedervereinigung) was the process of re-establishing Germany as a united and fully sovereign state, which took place between 2 May 1989 and 15 March 1991. The day of 3 October 1990 when the Ge ...

, the arrival of

Mikhail Gorbachev Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (2 March 1931 – 30 August 2022) was a Soviet politician who served as the 8th and final leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to dissolution of the Soviet Union, the country's dissolution in 1991. He served a ...

to power in the Soviet Union, the 1991 coup d'état against him,

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...

under

Boris Yeltsin Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin ( rus, Борис Николаевич Ельцин, p=bɐˈrʲis nʲɪkɐˈla(j)ɪvʲɪtɕ ˈjelʲtsɨn, a=Ru-Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin.ogg; 1 February 1931 – 23 April 2007) was a Soviet and Russian politician wh ...

, and the fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. In 1997, she was assigned as a correspondent to Germany (first in Bonn and then in Berlin), returning to Moscow in 2001, again as a correspondent to Russia and many of the former Soviet satellites that made up the

Commonwealth of Independent States The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is a regional intergovernmental organization in Eurasia. It was formed following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It covers an area of and has an estimated population of 239,796,010. ...

. Pilar Bonet is also an associate researcher and expert at the Spanish think tank

Barcelona Centre for International Affairs The Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB) is a Spanish think tank headquartered in Barcelona, devoted to research in the field of international relations. It defines itself as an "independent institution" that studies specifically ...

, and has been recognized for her journalistic work on multiple occasions. She has twice been awarded by the International Press Club as Spain's best foreign correspondent (in 1989 and 2014), in 1990 she received the from the , and in 1996 she won the Cirilo Rodríguez Journalism Award.

Books

* ''Moscú'' (1988), * ''Imágenes sobre fondo rojo. Estampas de la crisis soviética'' (1992), * ''La Rusia imposible: Borís Yeltsin, un provinciano en el Kremlin'' (1994),

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bonet, Pilar 1952 births 20th-century Spanish women writers 21st-century Spanish women writers Autonomous University of Barcelona alumni Living people People from Ibiza Spanish reporters and correspondents Spanish women essayists Spanish women journalists University of Barcelona alumni