Mark Lowen


Mark Lowen is a British journalist. He is the BBC News Southern Europe Correspondent, based in Rome. He was previously based in Turkey, Greece and Serbia. He moved to Rome in 2019 and is often deployed elsewhere on major stories.

Education

Lowen was educated at Sheen Mount Primary School in Richmond upon Thames from which he was awarded a Scholarship in 1994 to King's College School, an independent school for boys in Wimbledon, followed by Balliol College at the University of Oxford,
where he obtained a First Class degree in History and French.

Life and career

Lowen joined the BBC's Paris bureau in 2005 as an intern, becoming a producer, followed by the BBC World Service in London in 2007 and BBC World News in 2008. He became BBC Balkans correspondent based in Belgrade in 2009, covering the former republics of Yugoslavia and Albania, during which time he reported on the first elections in Kosovo since independence, the trial of Radovan Karadžić, and the arrest of the former Commander-in-Chief of the Bosnian Serb Army, Ratko Mladić.
Lowen became BBC Athens correspondent in autumn 2011, replacing Malcolm Brabant, who had become seriously ill following a routine inoculation against yellow fever. He covered Greece's financial crisis before moving to Istanbul in 2014. From there, he reported among other subjects on terror attacks, the attempted coup, the migrant crisis, the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Syrian Civil War.

Family

Lowen is the grandson of Natalia Karp, née Weissman, a Jewish refugee from the Nazis and Holocaust survivor, whose story he told in a BBC broadcast and online report. Lowen is married to the Portuguese actor, director and playwright :pt:Pedro Penim|Pedro Penim. His mother is the British actress Eve Karpf.