Ronald E. Yates is a multi-award-winning author of historical fiction and action/adventure novels, including the popular and award-winning Finding Billy Battles trilogy. His extraordinarily accurate books have captivated fans from around the world who applaud his ability to blend fact and fiction.
Before turning to fiction, Ron was an award-winning foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and Professor Emeritus of Journalism at the University of Illinois where he was also the Dean of the College of Media.
Book 3 of the trilogy ("The Lost Years of Billy Battles") was published in June 2018. His book, "The Improbable Journeys of Billy Battles," is the second in his Finding Billy Battles trilogy of novels and was published in June 2016. It has won multiple awards, including the 2017 KCT International Literary Award, the 2016 New Apple Literary Award in the Action/Adventure category and First Place in the 2016 Chanticleer International Book Awards in the Literary Category. It was also a finalist for the Diamond Book Award in the United Kingdom. The first book in the trilogy, "Finding Billy Battles," was published in 2014 and was a finalist for a Laramie Award.
Ron has been a presenting author at the Kansas Book Festival, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and the San Diego Book Festival, among other venues. He is also the author of The Kikkoman Chronicles: A Global Company with A Japanese Soul, published by McGraw-Hill. Other books include Aboard the Tokyo Express: A Foreign Correspondent's Journey through Japan, a collection of columns translated into Japanese, as well as three journalism textbooks: The Journalist's Handbook, International Reporting & Foreign Correspondents, and Business and Financial Reporting in a Global Economy.
Before leaving the world of professional journalism where he toiled 25 years, Ron lived and worked in Japan, Southeast Asia, and both Central and South America where he covered several history-making events including the fall of South Vietnam and Cambodia; the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing; and wars and revolutions in Afghanistan, the Philippines, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, among other places.
Ron's work as a war correspondent resulted in several awards, including the Inter-American Press Association's Tom Wallace Award for coverage of Central and South America; the Peter Lisagor Award from the Society of Professional Journalists; three Edward Scott Beck Awards for International Reporting, and three Pulitzer nominations.
He is a proud graduate of the William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas. He served with the U.S. Army Security Agency as a SIGINT analyst.
He writes a blog entitled "ForeignCorrespondent" that can be found at: http://ronaldyatesbooks.com/category/foreign-correspondent
His Website and authors pages can be found at: http://ronaldyatesbooks.com
and at the Authors' Guild: http://www.ronaldyates.com/index.htm and
Amazon's Author Central page: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001KH
