Lindsey Hilsum.
LINDSEY HILSUM: MARIE COLVIN BIOGRAPHY
IN EXTREMIS: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF THE WAR CORRESPONDENT MARIE COLVIN (2018)
Winner of the 2018 James Tait Black Prize for Biography.
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Marie Colvin (born 1956) was a British journalist who worked as a foreign affairs correspondent for the Sunday Times from 1985 until her death in 2012. She was killed in a targeted attack by Syrian forces while she was reporting on the civil war siege of Homs. She grew up in Queens, New York, where her father, a Marine Corps veteran of the Second World War, was an English teacher. Colvin took her degree in anthropology at Yale University. She entered journalism with United Press International, then moved to the Sunday Times where she became the paper’s Middle East correspondent. She also covered conflicts in East Timor, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Serbia and Chechnya. She lost the sight in her left eye while reporting on the Sri Lankan civil war, being struck by the blast from a rocket-propelled grenade; she thereafter wore a distinctive patch over the damaged eye.
In her account of Marie Colvin’s driven and dramatic life, fellow foreign correspondent Lesley Hilsum draws on unpublished diaries, and on interviews with Colvin’s family and colleagues. The Guardian wrote of the book: ‘A friend and fellow war reporter details Colvin’s hard-drinking, hard-living decades and her inspiring career covering one humanitarian disaster after another.’
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Lesley Hilsum (born 1958) is an English author and broadcaster, who is the International Editor for Channel 4 News. She is a regular contributor to the Guardian, the Observer, and the New Statesman. She has covered major world conflicts, including those in Egypt, Bahrain, Zimbabwe and Iran. She was embedded with a frontline marine unit during the US assault on Falluja in 2004. Before becoming a journalist she work in international aid in Africa and Latin America. Hilsum was educated at the Worcester Grammar School for Girls, and the University of Exeter, where she obtained a degree in French and Spanish. She is the daughter of the eminent physicist Cyril Hilsum.
