David Smith has been Washington correspondent of The Guardian since October 2015, reporting on the presidential election campaigns of Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and other candidates. He has travelled to the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and reports from the White House and State Department in Washington.

He was previously Africa correspondent, based in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he wrote about the 2010 football World Cup, death of Nelson Mandela and murder trial of Oscar Pistorius. He travelled to countries including the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Ivory Coast, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

David studied at the University of Leeds and edited its student newspaper before joining the Daily Express as a graduate trainee in 1997. He moved to The Observer in 2003 and reported from countries including Afghanistan and Iraq.

David appears as a commentator on NPR, the BBC, CNN, Sky News and other media and has more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. In 2014 he was runner-up in the UK's Frontline Club Awards and shortlisted for the Society of Editors foreign reporter of the year, and has been longlisted twice for the One World Media Awards and twice for the Orwell Prize for political writing.