About Roland de Courson

Roland de Courson is a French journalist born in Spain (Madrid, 1970).

A graduate of the Ecole supérieure de journalisme de Lille and of the Gobelins School of Image in Paris, he started his career as a reporter in several local French-language newspapers in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Canada, before joining Agence France-Presse (AFP), an international news agency, in 1994. He has since been based in Paris, Madrid, Perpignan, Tokyo and Hong Kong, and is currently a global news editor in Seoul.

Passionate about street photography, but also fascinated by geography, geopolitics, borders, and their visual representations, Roland is the creator of K-Scar, a seminal documentary project on the division of Korea that explores the border regions surrounding the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) through photography and storytelling.

He was also the founder in 2012 and the editor of the Agence France-Presse’s Blogs (Correspondent, Making-of) which over the years became the couch for all the AFP reporters confronted with life-changing or traumatic situations during their assignments. Some of these testimonies have been compiled in a book in French, Qu’auriez vous fait à ma place ? (“What would you have done in my place?”), published in 2017 by Editions des Arènes.

In 2014, Roland’s Making-of blog received an award from the international Agora For Journalism for an article on the media coverage of the Islamic State. That same year, it was a finalist for The Bobs, the world’s largest international award for blogs founded and sponsored by the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle, to honor websites “that contribute to freedom of expression by advancing and enriching open debates on the internet.”