Lindsey Hilsum


Lindsey Hilsum is an English television journalist and writer. She is the International Editor for Channel 4 News, and a regular contributor to the Sunday Times, The Observer, The Guardian, The New Statesman, and Granta.

Biography

Early life

Her father is professor Cyril Hilsum, a physicist best known for research that helped form the basis of modern LCD technology. She attended Worcester Grammar School for Girls and the University of Exeter, where she graduated with a degree in French and Spanish.

Career

Lindsey Hilsum is Channel 4 News' International Editor. She has covered the major conflicts of the past two decades, including the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2011 she reported the uprisings in Egypt and Bahrain, as well as Libya. She has also reported extensively from Iran and Zimbabwe, and was Channel 4 News China Correspondent from 2006 to 2008. During the 2004 US assault on Falluja, she was embedded with a frontline marine unit, and in 1994, she was the only English-speaking foreign correspondent in Rwanda when the genocide started. Before becoming a journalist, she was an aid worker, first in Latin America and then in Africa.
Her first book, Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution, was published by Faber in the UK in April 2012, and by Penguin Press in the USA in May 2012, and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Her second book, In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA in November 2018, and by Chatto & Windus in the UK in January 2019. This book has been shortlisted for the 2019 Costa book prize in the biography category.

Awards

She was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Essex in 2004 and has won several awards including the Royal Television Society Journalist of the Year, James Cameron Award, One World Broadcasting Trust award, Amnesty, Voice of the Viewer and Listener and the Charles Wheeler Award. In 2017 she was awarded the Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society She won the 2018 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for In Extremis.