Duncan Campbell (journalist, born 1944)


Duncan Campbell is a British journalist and author who has worked particularly on crime issues. He was a senior reporter/correspondent for The Guardian from 1987 until 2010. He is also the author of several books.

Background and personal life

Campbell was educated at the Edinburgh Academy and at Glenalmond College, an independent school in Perth and Kinross in Scotland
Campbell is married to British actress Julie Christie; they have lived together since 1979, but the date they wed is disputed. In January 2008, several news outlets reported that the couple had quietly married in India two months earlier, in November 2007, which Christie called "nonsense", adding: "I have been married for a few years. Don't believe what you read in the papers."

Journalist

Campbell was a copywriter for advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather before he quit in 1971, aged 26, to visit India, and pursue an ambition to become a journalist. Decades later, he turned the experience of the trip into his first novel, The Paradise Trail.
Prior to joining The Guardian, Campbell worked for the London Daily News and City Limits, Time Out and LBC Radio. He has also worked on BBC Radio Five Live's Crime Desk programme.
In June 2009, it was announced by The Guardian that Campbell would take voluntary redundancy and he now works as a freelance writer, including for The Guardian.
Campbell is a former chair of the Crime Reporters' Association, for four years in the 1990s, and winner of the Bar Council Legal Reporting Award for Newspaper Journalist of the Year in 1992.

Author

Campbell is the author of two novels, The Paradise Trail and If It Bleeds. The Paradise Trail is set largely in India in 1971. It is partly a murder mystery and partly an affectionate depiction of life on the "hippie trail": the cheap hotels and eating places, the music, the drug-fuelled conversations.
Campbell has also written several nonfiction books, including a history of British crime from the 1930s to the 1990s and That Was Business, This Is Personal. A Stranger and Afraid covers the story of Caroline Beale. His 2016 book We'll All Be Murdered In Our Beds draws on his many years as a crime correspondent.