Women in the City Annual Lunch Keynote Speaker

The Keynote Speaker

Our 2009 keynote speaker was Gillian Tett.

Award winning journalist Gillian Tett oversees global coverage of the financial markets for the Financial Times, the world's leading newspaper covering the financial markets.

In March 2009 she was named Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards and in 2008 was named British Business Journalist of the Year. In 2007, she was awarded the Wincott prize, the premier British award for financial journalism, for her capital markets coverage. She was also shortlisted for the British business journalist of the year award.

Gillian 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 (an agenda-setting column on business and financial topics). She is the author of Saving the Sun; How Wall Street mavericks shook up Japan’s financial system and made billions (Harper Collins and Random House) and in April 2009 published Fools Gold: How an Ingenious Tribe of Bankers Rewrote the Rules of Finance, Made a Fortune and Survived a Catastrophe (Little, Brown).

She also sits on an advisory panel on financial regulation at the London School of Economics, is an associate fellow of finance at Westminster University, and an advisor to the main accountancy body in the UK. She speaks regularly at conferences around the world on finance and global markets, most recently holding audiences at the San Francisco Federal Reserve, the European Parliament, and the London School of Economics.

Gillian Tett has a PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University, based on research conducted in the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s. She speaks French, Russian, moderate Japanese and Persian.