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Sarah Lyall      

Writer-At-Large for The New York Times; Reporting on the 2020 Election

Sarah Lyall has been working as a writer at large, covering a variety of desks, including sports, culture, media and international. Currently, Lyall has switched over to the politics desk and is covering the 2020 election for the Times.

Previously, Lyall was a reporter in the London bureau of The New York Times, starting in 1995. Before working as a London-based reporter for the paper, Lyall covered book publishing for the culture section from 1991 until 1994. She was a reporter for the metro desk from 1988 until 1991, covering general news and other beats, including night rewrite, the N.Y.P.D., Long Island and Albany. She joined The Times in 1987 as a clerk in the Washington Bureau.

Lyall has also written for various magazines, including Vogue and Vanity Fair.

Born in New York City in 1963, Lyall received her B.A. in history from Yale University in 1985. During her time at Yale, Lyall was an editor at the Yale Daily News.

Lyall has two children, Alice and Isobel. In her spare time, she enjoys reading and rock climbing.

Her first book was entitled "The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British," and was released in 2009.

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Nick Casey and Sarah Lyall Join Politics Desk
Sarah Lyall, one of the most gifted and versatile writers at The Times, has an astute eye for politics that has yielded terrific pieces about Boris Johnson, Theresa May, David Cameron and other British leaders she covered for years as a correspondent in London. More recently she has brought that eye to American politics, writing the Abroad in America newsletter during the 2018 midterm elections, which explained to readers — as it promised in the first installment — “What the (insert extreme word of choice) is going on over there?” Sarah joined The Times as a clerk in the Washington bureau and also did a tour of duty in Albany during her years on the Metro desk, before taking on an array of big assignments in International, Sports, Culture, Books and Media. Among her most vivid reporting memories was a surreal 20-minute phone conversation with an irascible elderly reader who berated her for failing, in an article about landfills, to address the problem of what to do about the fish that were trapped inside. (Sarah finally realized that the problem stemmed from the headline: “Long Island Flounders in Closing Landfills.”) A graduate of Yale with a degree in history, Sarah has also written for various magazines, including Vogue and Vanity Fair. And she has a great appreciation for grammar, which came through in her first piece for Politics about President Trump’s Twitter war on spelling.

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