Born in London, Perlez grew up in Australia, and graduated from the University of Sydney. In 1967, she traveled to China with a group of Australian students who went for a vacation but ended up spending three weeks in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. She got her first taste of the United States during an American Field Service scholarship in the mid-60s, and after three years in her first journalism job - at The Australian newspaper - she left Australia for New York in 1972. There she joined The New York Post to cover politics, leaving when Rupert Murdoch bought the newspaper in 1977. She worked briefly at the SoHo Weekly News, writing a media and political column, and then for a year-long stint, joined The New York Daily News. She began her career at The New York Times in 1981.
Career
At the start of her career as a foreign correspondent, Perlez was a Pulitzer finalist for coverage of the famine in Somalia, and the dispatch of American forces. Perlez served as bureau chief in Nairobi, Kenya from 1988 to 1992 when civil wars were raging in Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia. In 1993, she became bureau chief in Warsaw, Poland, writing about the emergence of Central Europe from grip of the Cold War. In 1996, she moved to Vienna, a base for covering the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, and his aggression against Kosovo. As Chief Diplomatic Correspondent based in Washington, Perlez traveled with Secretary of State, Madeleine K. Albright, to Asia, Europe and Africa, and covered Secretary Colin Powell during his first year in the job. In 2002, she moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, where she first noted the rise of China and its impact on Southeast Asia, a series of articles that were among the first to document China's increasing influence in the region. For a series of articles on gold mining in Indonesia and in Peru, and the deleterious impact of the mining on local communities, she won the Overseas Press Club award for environmental reporting. During four years based in Islamabad, Pakistan, Perlez wrote about the rising tensions between the United States and Pakistan, and the deep underlying differences between the two countries that were officially allies in the war on terror. Her articles included reporting on the Inter Services Intelligence and the Pakistani army, as well as on the Taliban, and their ability to strike at the core of Pakistan's institutions. Several articles pin pointed the involvement of the Pakistani army and intelligence service in extra judicial killings, including the murder of a Pakistani journalist in 2011.
