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Caroline Moorehead | |
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| Born | Caroline Mary Moorehead 28 October 1944 London |
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| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | University of London |
| Subject | Human rights |
| Relatives | Alan Moorehead (father) |
Caroline Mary Moorehead OBE FRSL (born 28 October 1944) is a human rights journalist and biographer. [1]
Born in London, Moorehead is the daughter of Australian war correspondent Alan Moorehead and his English wife Lucy Milner. [2] She received a BA from the University of London in 1965. [3]
Moorehead has written eight biographies, of Bertrand Russell, Heinrich Schliemann, Freya Stark, Iris Origo, Martha Gellhorn, Sidney Bernstein, Edda Mussolini, and Henriette-Lucy, Marquise de La Tour du Pin Gouvernet. The latter figure was the daughter-in-law of Jean-Frédéric de la Tour du Pin, who experienced the French Revolution and left a rich collection of letters as well as a memoir covering the decades from the fall of the Ancien Régime to the rise of Napoleon III.
Moorehead has also written many non-fiction pieces centered on human rights including a history of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Dunant's Dream, based on previously unseen archives in Geneva, Troublesome People, a book on pacifists, and a work on terrorism, Hostages to Fortune. A work in this category on refugees in the modern world, Human Cargo, was published in 2004. Moorehead has also published A Train in Winter, a book which focuses on 230 French women of the Resistance who were sent to Auschwitz, on Convoi des 31000, and of whom only forty-nine survived. [4] Her book Village of Secrets (2014) is on a similar theme, describing a story where a wartime French village helped 3,000 Jews to safety.
Moorehead has written many book reviews for assorted papers and reviews, including Literary Review , The Times Literary Supplement , Daily Telegraph , Independent, Spectator , and New York Review of Books . She specialized in human rights as a journalist, contributing a column first to The Times and then the Independent, and co-producing and writing a series of programs on human rights for BBC Television.
She is a trustee and director of Index on Censorship and a governor of the British Institute of Human Rights. She has served on the committees of the Royal Society of Literature, of which she is a Fellow; the Society of Authors; English PEN; and the London Library. She also helped start a legal advice centre for asylum seekers from the Horn of Africa in Cairo, where she helps run a number of educational projects.
She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1993. [5] She was appointed an OBE in 2005 for services to literature. [6]
