He has been editor of SABC TV News, the Sunday Express, and Rand Daily Mail in Johannesburg, correspondent for The Economist, The Washington Post, The Observer in London and Holland’s NRC Handelsblad. In 1979 he was named joint International Editor of the Year. In 1985 he received Britain’s premier award for foreign reporting, and was nominated for a Pulitzer prize. In 1992 he founded the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism which has trained more than 13,000 journalists from the African continent. Sparks has written three books on South Africa, The Mind of South Africa (1989), Tomorrow is Another Country (1994), and Beyond the Miracle.