Prize type: Journalism prizeTTTT

Helen has spent most of her career covering the arts industry, primarily on the staff of The Sunday Times, where she worked for 34 years, the last 25 of them as arts editor. She started out in academia, teaching English while gaining an MA at Colorado University in Boulder, USA, then going on to a PhD there. Back in the UK she moved into freelance journalism, writing about everything from film to fashion. Her Sunday Times section, Culture, won Supplement of the Year at the UK Press Awards in 2003 and was nominated multiple times; she has also regularly served on juries (London Film Festival, South Bank Show/Sky Arts awards, So You Think You’re Funny? awards) and has chaired the Edinburgh Comedy (formerly Perrier) Awards twice.

She now reviews theatre for the Arts Desk and is on the boards of The Mono Box, which provides assistance to people of all backgrounds who want to work in the theatre industry, and of IF Opera, a new opera company serving southwest England.

Clive Myrie  is a multi award winning journalist, one of the BBC’s most experienced foreign correspondents and a recognised face as a BBC News presenter. Born in Bolton, Lancashire he studied law at the University of Sussex.​ Clive has served as the BBC’s Asia, Africa, Washington and Europe Correspondent. He has a particular interest in US politics, having covered the administrations of three Presidents (Clinton, Bush and Obama,) and reported on the last seven Presidential races, including most recently the election of Joe Biden. As well as presenting the One, Six and Ten 0’Clock News bulletins on BBC One, and hosting news shows on the BBC News Channel, Clive continues to travel the world as a reporter, and makes features and programmes for Panorama, Newsnight and Radio 4.

Iain Martin is the editor, publisher and co-founder of Reaction. He writes a weekly column on politics for The Times and appears as a commentator on the BBC and CNN. He is the author of the award-winning book Making it Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the men who blew up the British Economy and of Crash, Bang, Wallop: the inside story of Big bang and financial revolution that changed the world.

Rosie Blau is Editor of 1843 Magazine, sister publication to The Economist and named for the year The Economist was founded. She joined The Economist in 2011 as a reporter on the Britain section. From 2014-17 she was based in Beijing as China Correspondent. She began her reporting career on trade magazines and worked at the Financial Times from 2002-2011, where her jobs included Books Editor and Leader Writer. She was a judge for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2010.

Kamran Abbasi is a doctor, journalist, editor and broadcaster. Following five years in hospital medicine, working in various medical specialties such as psychiatry and cardiology, he moved into senior editorial roles at the British Medical Journal from 1997 to 2005. He is now back at The BMJ in a new role as executive editor for content, leading the journal’s strategic growth internationally, digitally, and in print.

Carrie Gracie grew up in northeast Scotland and set up a restaurant before taking a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford. She spent a year teaching in two Chinese universities and then built a small film business before joining the BBC in 1987 as a trainee producer. In 2014, she took up a newly created post as BBC China editor and covered all key news stories in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In January 2018, Carrie left her post as BBC China editor in protest at unequal pay, publishing an open letter to BBC audiences and giving evidence at a parliamentary select committee. She returned to BBC HQ as a news presenter and continued to campaign for an equal, fair and transparent pay structure at the national broadcaster. In September 2019 she published her first book Equal: How We Fix the Gender Pay Gap and in 2020 she left the BBC to pursue other projects.

Gloria was a political journalist for 15 years working for the BBC and then ITV’s breakfast programme GMTV. She interviewed most senior politicians during that time including Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and David Cameron as Leader of the Opposition. She was elected as the Labour MP for Ashfield in Nottinghamshire in 2010 but did not stand for re-election in 2019. She spent most of her time as an MP on Labour’s front bench and Shadow Cabinet.

Vanora Bennett is an author and former Orwell Journalism Prize winner. After a distinguished career as a foreign correspondent and comment writer for Reuters, the Los Angeles Times and The Times, she has written two non-fiction books about Russia and several novels. She is currently working on climate change with a development bank and planning a book that features Yiddish tango before the Second World War.

Mihir Bose is an award winning journalist and author. He writes and broadcasts on social and historical issues as well as sport for a range of outlets including the BBC, the Financial Times, Evening Standard and Irish Times. He has written more than 30 books and his most recent publication is Lion and Lamb, a Portrait of British Moral Duality. His books range from a look at how India has evolved since Independence, the only narrative history of Bollywood, biographies of Michael Grade and Subhas Bose, and a study of the Aga Khans.

Mihir was the BBC’s first Sports Editor, the first non-white to be a BBC editor. He covered all BBC outlets including the flagship Ten O’Clock News, the Today programme, Five Live and the website. He moved to the BBC after 12 years at the Daily Telegraph where he was the chief sports news correspondent but also wrote on other issues including race, immigration, and social and cultural issues. Before that he worked for the Sunday Times for 20 years. He has contributed to nearly all the major UK newspapers and presented programmes for radio and television.

Bose has an honorary doctorate from Loughborough University for his outstanding contribution to journalism and the promotion of equality. He has won several awards: business columnist of the year, sports news reporter of the year, sports story of the year and Silver Jubilee Literary award for his History of Indian Cricket. Mihir lives in west London with his wife.

Ben Fenton was a reporter for 30 years. He began journalistic life as the “pop music” writer for the Oxford Mail before becoming an indentured trainee. After four years, Ben fluked a move to Fleet Street by getting a place in the newsroom of The Daily Telegraph, then the preeminent “reporters’ paper”, as the junior nightshift reporter. In 20 years at the Telegraph, he covered stories in more than 30 countries and was appointed Washington Correspondent and finally to the role of the Senior Reporter. In 2007, Ben moved to the Financial Times where he was chief media correspondent for five years and then set up the FT’s Live Newsdesk. He joined Edelman six years ago to head a consultancy practice for media companies including C4, Guardian Media Group and the New York Times. He still takes notes in shorthand, but can rarely read them back.

Vaughan is an award-winning video journalist who founded the Frontline Club in London in 2003 as an institution to champion independent journalism. During the 1990s he ran Frontline Television News, an agency that represented the interests of freelance video journalists. Its history has been detailed in a book “Frontline: The True Story of the British Mavericks who Changed the Face of War Reporting'” by the BBC. Since 1988 Vaughan has filmed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo and elsewhere, including the only uncontrolled footage of the Gulf War in 1991 while disguised for two months as a British Army officer. Vaughan was a founding Trustee of the Rory Peck Trust. His home was refuge to Julian Assange for 13 months in 2011/12. In 2011 Vaughan won a Bayeux award for his film on US Medivac shown on Al Jazeera.

Sam Taylor is the editor of The Lady, England’s longest running women’s magazine.  She started her journalism career on the London listings magazine City Limits, eventually becoming editor, before going on to hold several senior editorial roles at newspapers including The Independent, the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday.

Her satirical column for The Oldie magazine, East of Islington, was made into a successful novel and she recently edited a book of non-fiction, Make Do and Send, about letters written during wartime rationing.  She is currently writing a dramatized version of the life of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor on the  American medical register who spent her final years living with a woman in Hastings.  Sam also writes features and comment pieces.

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.

A bestselling author, journalist, editor and broadcaster Rachel Johnson has been in national newspapers since the age of 23, when, after leaving Oxford, she became the first female graduate trainee at The Financial Times. She has worked for the BBC, the Foreign Office, and has written weekly columns for Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, the Sunday Times, and the Evening Standard among others and was editor of The Lady from 2009 – 2012.

Professor Suzanne Franks is head of the Journalism Department at City, University of London, which educates over 500 young journalists a year – from all over the world. She is a former BBC broadcaster who has also published widely on international news and women in the media, including Women and Journalism, for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, where she was a visiting fellow in 2015. She teaches an ethics class and one on Humanitarian Communication. Her latest book is an edited volume, Africa’s Media Image in the 21^st Century. She appears regularly in the media and contributes to panels, speaking on questions including contemporary journalism education and journalism ethics.

@suzannehfranks

Sir David Bell is a non-executive director of the Economist. He retired as a director of Pearson plc and Chairman of the Financial Times at the end of 2009 after thirteen years on the Board.  David was appointed Chief Executive of the Financial Times in 1993 and became Chairman in 1996. In July 1998 he was also appointed Pearson’s Director for People with responsibility for the recruitment, motivation, development and reward of employees across the Pearson Group & in June 2003 he became Chairman of Pearson Inc in New York. David, born 30.9.46 in Henfield, Sussex was educated at Cambridge University and the University of Pennsylvania is married with three children and lives in Islington. David received his knighthood for services to industry, the arts and charity.

Elinor Mary Goodman is a UK journalist, best known as political editor of Channel 4 News from 1988 to 2005. Goodman joined Channel 4 News as political correspondent in 1982. Prior to her employment at Channel 4, she worked for the Financial Times. Goodman was appointed in 2005 to chair the Affordable Rural Housing Commission established by DEFRA. When she retired, she acted as a regular presenter of the BBC Radio 4 programme The Week in Westminster she served as one of six panel members of the public inquiry led by Lord Justice Leveson into the hacking of phones by News International.

Alan is a former BBC researcher, reporter and special correspondent. He joined the BBC in 1983, and reported for Radio 4’s Today Programme. He is the co-author of the acclaimed book The Death of Yugoslavia. Alan has reported for Baghdad, Kuwait, the former Yugoslavia, Johannesburg and Moscow. In 2014, Alan led the BBC’s coverage of the Scottish independence referendum. Alan is chair of the Edinburgh International Book Festival and has won several awards including a Sony Documentary Gold Award in 2000.