Lindsey Hilsum Hon FBA

Summary

Lindsey Hilsum is a broadcaster and writer, with a particular interest in conflict, humanitarian issues and poetry.

She is Channel 4 News' International Editor and the author of three books of non-fiction. She has covered many of the major wars and refugee movements of the last four decades.

After studying Spanish and French at Exeter University, she worked for Oxfam in Latin America and Unicef in East Africa. She later became a freelance journalist, stringing for the BBC and the Guardian. In 1994, she was the only English-speaking foreign correspondent in Rwanda as the genocide started. Channel 4 News appointed her Diplomatic Correspondent in 1997.

She reported the 1999 intervention in Kosovo from Belgrade and the 2003 invasion of Iraq from Baghdad, and was Channel 4 News China Correspondent from 2006 to 2008.

In 2011 she witnessed the Arab Spring uprisings in Libya and Egypt, and the summer of 2015 refugee crisis in Europe. She has covered the wars in Syria, Ukraine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, the Sahel and Israel/Palestine, as well as reporting from Iran, Zimbabwe and other countries.

Her awards include Royal Television Society Journalist of the Year, the Charles Wheeler Award and the James Cameron Award as well as the Patron’s Medal from the Royal Geographical Society and awards from One World Media, Amnesty International and BAFTA.

Her writing has featured in the New York Review of Books, the Sunday Times, the Times Literary Supplement and Granta.

Her book, 'In Extremis; the Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin', won the 2019 James Tait Black Prize for biography. 'I Brought the War With Me; Stories and Poems from the Frontline', a collection of her own eye-witness reporting from conflict, with selected poems, was published in 2024.

She is the co-founder of the Marie Colvin Journalists’ Network, a charity supporting female journalists in the Arab World.