Tim Marshall was a foreign correspondent and then Foreign Affairs Editor with Sky News for thirty years before leaving full time journalism to concentrate on writing and analysis. Originally from Leeds, Tim arrived at broadcasting from the road less travelled. Not a media studies or journalism graduate, in fact not a graduate at all, after a wholly unsuccessful career as a painter and decorator he worked his way through newsroom nightshifts, and unpaid stints as a researcher and runner before eventually securing himself a foothold on the first rung of the broadcasting career ladder.
Tim reported in the field from Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia during the Balkan wars of the 1990’s. He spent the majority of the 1999 Kosovo crisis in Belgrade, where he was one of the few western journalists who stayed on to report from one of the main targets of NATO bombing raids. Tim was in Kosovo to greet the NATO troops on the day they advanced into Pristina. In recent years he covered the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. He has written for many of the national newspapers including the Times, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, and the Sunday Times. His book ‘Prisoners of Geography’ is an international best seller. This was followed by ‘Worth Dying For. The Power and Politics of Flags’ and this year saw the release of ‘Divided; Why we are living in an Age of Walls’ which went straight into the Sunday Times top ten bestsellers.
Tim has been shot with bird pellet in Cairo, hit over the head with a plank of wood in London, bruised by the police in Tehran, arrested by Serbian intelligence, detained in Damascus, declared persona non grata in Croatia, bombed by the RAF in Belgrade and tear-gassed all over the world. However, he says none of this compares with the experience of going to see his beloved Leeds United away at Millwall FC in London.