Kim Murphy to head Seattle Bureau

Here's the memo to the staff from Scott Kraft, National Editor:

I'm delighted to announce that Kim Murphy, the paper's highly decorated London bureau chief, will become chief of our Seattle bureau early next month.

This will be a homecoming of sorts for Kim and her family -- both to Seattle and to the National staff. She covered the Northwest for us from Seattle for six years in the 1990s, before her move to the Foreign staff in Moscow. She won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 2005 from Moscow and moved to London shortly afterward.

Kim has been at the paper since 1983, when she joined as a general assignment writer for the Orange County edition. In addition to Seattle, Moscow and London, she's also reported for the paper from Cairo.

Kim's first journalism job was at the North Biloxian, in Mississippi, where she was assistant editor. She later worked at the Minot (N.D.) Daily News and the Orange County Register.

Her string of awards includes a Sigma Delta Chi national award for foreign correspondence in 1993 and the Los Angeles Times Publisher's Prize for her work during the Persian Gulf War in 1990.

Kim and her husband, Ilya, have two children. She is also a licensed pilot, a skill she acquired during her early days in North Dakota, and she still flies occasionally in Great Britain (though we intend to insist she fly commercial on assignment).

She is a graduate of Minot State University, where she studied English literature.