Ean Higgins grew up in Texas and Quebec, before moving to Australia with his Canadian father and Australian mother. He has worked as a reporter, section editor, chief-of-staff and foreign correspondent for Australia's three national newspapers over nearly four decades. He served his cadetship on the Australian Financial Review where he was appointed the newspaper's first New Zealand correspondent, then moved to the Fairfax group's investigative title Times on Sunday, before joining The Australian in 1988 where among other roles he served as foreign news editor, Inquirer editor, Europe correspondent and Sydney bureau chief. In recent years he has returned to reporting on The Australian, focusing on crime, corruption, politics, aviation and the interplay among them. Higgins holds a bachelor's degree in international relations from the University of Sussex, and a master's from the Australian National University. He learned to fly as a young man in Quebec, as a student piloting Cessna 150s on skis in winter. He won a Kennedy Award for Best Online Reporting for his coverage of a bush fire, and a Quebec Grand Prize for Independent Journalism for an opinion piece on language politics published in the French-language national daily Le Devoir.
