John F. Burns (born October 4, 1944) is a foreign correspondent for The New York Times.

Born in Nottingham, England, his family emigrated to Canada when he was young where he later studied at McGill University.

In the early 1970s, Burns wrote for the Toronto Globe and Mail, covering both local stories and later serving as a China correspondent.

Burns joined The New York Times in 1975 and has written since for that publication. He has been assigned to and headed several of the Times' foreign bureaus.

He along with fellow Times journalists John Darnton and Michael T. Kaufman won the 1978 George Polk Award for foreign reporting for coverage of Africa.

In 1986, while chief of the Times' Beijing bureau, Burns was incarcerated on suspicion of espionage by the Chinese government. Charges were dropped after an investigation, but Burns was subsequently expelled from the country.

Burns was awarded the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting citing "his courageous and thorough coverage of the destruction of Sarajevo and the barbarous killings in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina." He received his second Pulitzer in 1997, this time "For his courageous and insightful coverage of the harrowing regime imposed on Afghanistan by the Taliban."

Burns was based in Baghdad during the lead up to the Iraq war in 2003 and has written extensively on the war and the subsequent occupation.