2026 Journalism prize finalist

Christina Lamb

Sunday Times

Christina Lamb is Chief Foreign Correspondent at The Sunday Times as well as a bestselling author. Since starting off in Peshawar at the age of 22, she has spent almost four decades covering conflicts from Afghanistan to Sudan, Iraq to Ukraine, particularly focusing on what war does to women. No journalist has done more to highlight the use of rape as a weapon of war nor the lack of accountability. Although the subject is now more often reported, when she wrote an impassioned piece about Yazidi sex-slaves in 2015, Lamb was told by her male foreign editor no one would read it. She got it on the magazine cover.

Her shortlisted pieces were:

• Sophie and the surgeon who saves child rape victims
• A Tale of Two Syrias
• In Sudan it feels like humanity has died
• I’m a new Gisele

I am in awe of the courage and commitment of Christina, who repeatedly puts herself in danger’s way because there is some evil which needs to be exposed. In the killing zones in Congo and Syria and Sudan, there she is with nothing more than a notebook for protection. She is also an exceptionally skilled writer, laying out the big picture with maximum clarity, then adding the human stories of suffering which must break any reader’s heart.

– Nick Davies, Judge, The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2026</p