Christina Lamb

Christina Lamb is roving foreign correspondent for the UK's largest weekly paper, the Sunday Times and author of a number of bestselling books most recently I Am Malala with Malala Yousafzai which was named Britain's non fiction book of the year. She was awarded an OBE in 2013 by the Queen and has won numerous awards starting with Young Journalist of the Year in the British Press Awards for her coverage of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1988 and has been named Foreign Correspondent of the Year five times for reporting on Pakistan, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. Judges described her as “the ultimate foreign correspondent”.

She was recently featured in the Huffington Post.

An expert on Afghanistan and Pakistan, she has also received the Prix Bayeux, Europe’s most prestigious award for war correspondents and chosen by Britain’s top-selling women’s magazine Grazia as one of its Icons of the Decade.

In 2006 she narrowly escaped with her life from a Taliban ambush of British troops in Helmand and in October 2007 she was on Benazir Bhutto’s bus when it was bombed. Her perseverance and determination to get the story out has seen her return repeatedly to Zimbabwe, making 15 undercover trips since the murder of the first white farmer in 2000. She remained secretly in the country even after being declared an “enemy of the state” by the Mugabe regime for her expose of rape camps of girls as young as 12.

She also spent a year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where she met her husband. She is the author of the best-selling book “The Africa House” as well as “House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe”; “Waiting For Allah: Pakistan’s Struggle for Democracy”; and “The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan,” which was runner-up for Best Nonfiction book in the Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers Awards. Her second most recent book is “Small Wars Permitting: Dispatches from Foreign Lands,” a collection of her reportage.

She is a regular commentator on Sky and BBC TV and radio and has lectured and spoken at conferences all over the world from the Royal Geographical Society in London and the Edinburgh Festival to NATO summits and the National Library in Wellington, New Zealand.

A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Lamb received a degree in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University. She is on the board of Institute of War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) and a patron of the charities Afghan Connection and Hope for Children. She is married with a son. Follow her on Twitter @ChristinaLamb.