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TP Mishra is an award-winning investigative journalist and the founding editor of Bhutan's first news agency in exile. The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, CNN and The Diplomat have run his work. The New York Times and the BBC have told his story.
He was born in Dagana, Bhutan. In 1991 his family, like more than 100,000 other Lhotshampa, was given a week to leave the country after soldiers detained his father for 91 days. TP was seven. He grew up in the Beldangi II refugee camp in Jhapa, Nepal, and began reporting there in 2002, covering seven camps by bicycle for The Bhutan Reporter Monthly. Within four years he was running the paper as Chief Editor.
In 2006 he helped found the Bhutan News Service and edited it for the next five years. The Bhutan Press Union gave him its award that year, and from 2007 to 2009 he hosted "Saranarthi Sarokar" (Refugee Concern) on FM radio in Kathmandu.
He was resettled in the Bronx in 2009, where The New York Times photographed his first days in America. He became a U.S. citizen in 2014 and settled in Charlotte, North Carolina. Today he runs the Bhutan News Service's volunteer newsroom, with editors on four continents, and trains refugee journalists around the world. He also speaks at universities, newsrooms and community organizations; the sessions draw on what he actually did in the camps rather than classroom theory.