Isabel Hilton, OBE | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 25 November 1947 Aberdeen, Scotland |
| Alma mater | University of Edinburgh |
Isabel Nancy Hilton OBE (born 25 November 1947) is a Scottish journalist and broadcaster, based in London.
Isabel Hilton, OBE | |
|---|---|
| | |
| Born | 25 November 1947 Aberdeen, Scotland |
| Alma mater | University of Edinburgh |
Isabel Nancy Hilton OBE (born 25 November 1947) is a Scottish journalist and broadcaster, based in London.
Hilton attended school in Alford, Aberdeenshire, Bradford Girls' Grammar School (Yorkshire) and Walnut Hills High School (Cincinnati, Ohio). She graduated from Edinburgh University, where she studied Chinese to post-graduate level, subsequently studying at Beijing Languages Institute and Fudan University, Shanghai. In 1976, she briefly served as secretary of the Scotland-China Association, based at her University, and was placed on MI5's "black" list, which prevented her from accepting a job offer with the BBC in 1976. [1]
Over a long career in national and international print, online and broadcast media, Isabel Hilton has covered global politics, conflict, development, human rights, climate change and environmental degradation. In recent years her work has focussed on the impacts of a rising China with particular emphasis on climate change and China's global environmental footprint.
In addition to her writing career, she has made several radio and television documentaries and presented both BBC's Radio 4 current affairs programme The World Tonight and Radio 3's arts and cultural strand, Night Waves. Hilton joined Scottish Television as a presenter in 1976, moving later that year to the Daily Express as feature writer after being blacklisted by MI5 from a job at the BBC. She left the Daily Express five months later to join the Sunday Times where she subsequently held posts as feature writer, news reporter, Insight reporter and Latin America editor. She covered the Falklands War from Buenos Aires in 1982 and continued to cover Latin America until the Sunday Times became embroiled in the dispute over its move to Wapping. She left the Sunday Times to join the founding team at The Independent as Latin America Editor. In 1989 she became Europe Editor, covering the fall of communism in Europe, then Chief Feature Writer. In 1994 she left The Independent to work on a book, whilst also taking up a new role as presenter of The World Tonight (1995–98) on BBC Radio 4, and from 1999 as presenter of Nightwaves on BBC Radio 3. She contributed a regular column to The Guardian 1997–2003) and from 2000 to 2003 was also a staff writer on the New Yorker magazine, reporting from Latin America, South Asia and Europe. From March 2005 to July 2007, she was editor and then editor-in-chief of openDemocracy.net. In 2006 Hilton founded Chinadialogue, a fully bilingual not-for-profit newsroom dedicated to covering climate change with a particular focus on China. This was followed in 2010 by the Third Pole and later by www.dialogochino.net and www.chinadialogueocean.net. Hilton served as editor and CEO of the organisation, publishing reports from China, Latin America, east, south and Southeast Asia and the United States in a total of eleven languages. In 2021 she stepped back from her role as CEO to become Senior Adviser to the organisation, finally stepping down from that role in 2023.
In January 2023 Hilton became a contributing editor at Prospect Magazine. Hilton's written work has also appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New Statesman, The Economist, Granta, the Mail on Sunday, the Observer, the Financial Times, El Pais, Le Monde, La Stampa, Lettres Internationale, International Affairs, The World Today, The New European, Index on Censorship, Vogue (British and American), The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, the Times Literary Supplement, Foreign PolicyThe Literary Review, the London Review of Books, China File, Foreign Policy and many others.
Her television and radio documentaries include:
She also reported several shorter films for BBC 2's Correspondent series.
Hilton's radio documentaries include The Bitter Pill, The Gesar Epic, Flowers in the Backyard,The Chinese Media,The Return of Faith,The End of Empire,The Uses of History in China,The Shadow of the Emperor.
In 2007, Hilton delivered the Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture at Somerset House, London; in 2019, she delivered the annual James Cameron memorial lecture at City, University of London [2] on the subject: Journalism with Chinese characteristics: reflections on media in the new era. In 2022 she delivered the Sue Lloyd-Roberts Memorial Lecture.
Hilton is married to Neal Ascherson, with whom she has a son and a daughter. She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2009 Birthday Honours. [3] She holds an Honorary Doctorate from Bradford University and an Honorary Doctorate of the university from Stirling University. Hilton is an active participant in a number of track 2 dialogues and meetings, including Konigswinter, the Club of Three, the UK Canada Symposium and the British American Project. She has spoken at the World Economic Forum (China) and the Munich Security Forum and served as speaker of the jury for the Berlin Based Lettres Ulysses Award for Literary Reportage from 2001 – 2006, as a judge on Amnesty International’s Media Awards, the Kurt Schock Awards and the James Cameron Awards. She chaired the jury of the George Orwell Prize for Journalism 2022.
She is a regular discussion host at festivals and events, including How the Light Gets In and Web Summit (Lisbon), and as a commentator on Monocle Radio, BBC and other outlets, as a featured speaker in London Climate Week (2021), the FT Festival, the Edinburgh Book Festival and many others.
Past positions include:
She has also served as a member of the editorial board of International Affairs, the advisory board of the Latin America Bureau, the advisory board of the European Movement, the advisory board of the Association of Speakers of Chinese as a Second Language, and the editorial advisory board of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism,
Hilton chairs the board of the Centre for Investigative Journalism. She co-chairs the board of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and is a non-executive director of E3G, the climate think tank.
Mark James Walter Cameron CBE was a British journalist and writer, in whose memory the annual James Cameron Memorial Lecture is given.
William Nicolas Hutton is a British journalist. As of 2022, he writes a regular column for The Observer, co-chairs the Purposeful Company, and is the president-designate of the Academy of Social Sciences. He is the chair of the advisory board of the UK National Youth Corps. He was principal of Hertford College, University of Oxford from 2011 to 2020, and co-founder of the Big Innovation Centre, an initiative from the Work Foundation, having been chief executive of the Work Foundation from 2000 to 2008. He was formerly editor-in-chief of The Observer.
Caspar Henderson is a British writer and journalist living in Oxford, England. He has written on the subjects of energy, science, environment and human rights.
Anna Funder is an Australian author. She is the author of Stasiland, All That I Am, the novella The Girl With the Dogs and Wifedom.
Vitali Vitaliev is a Ukrainian-born journalist and writer who has worked in Russia, the United Kingdom, Australia and Ireland.
Charles Neal Ascherson is a Scottish journalist and writer. He has been described by Radio Prague as "one of Britain's leading experts on central and eastern Europe". Ascherson is the author of several books on the history of Poland and Ukraine. His work has appeared in The Guardian and The New York Review of Books.
Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature has considered her work as reflecting the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadian literature, exploring art, expression and politics inside Cambodia and China, as well as within diasporic East Asian communities. Thien's critically acclaimed novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages.
Dame Hilary Mary Mantel was a British writer whose work includes historical fiction, personal memoirs and short stories. Her first published novel, Every Day Is Mother's Day, was released in 1985. She went on to write 12 novels, two collections of short stories, a personal memoir, and numerous articles and opinion pieces.
Becky Hogge is a UK-based music and technology writer and the first full-time executive director of the Open Rights Group, resigning in 2008. She was previously the managing editor, and then the technology director and technology commissioning editor for openDemocracy.net. During her time with openDemocracy she helped establish the China environment website chinadialogue.net, along with editor Isabel Hilton. She is a former board member of the Open Knowledge Foundation. and a member of its advisory board.
Stephanie Hope Flanders is a British economist and journalist, currently the head of Bloomberg News Economics. She was previously chief market strategist for Britain and Europe for J.P. Morgan Asset Management, and before that was the BBC News economics editor for five years. Flanders is the daughter of British actor and comic singer Michael Flanders and disability campaigner Claudia Cockburn.
Mona Siddiqui is a British academic. She is Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at the University of Edinburgh, a member of the Commission on Scottish Devolution and a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. She is also a regular contributor to Thought for the Day, Sunday and The Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4, and to The Times, The Scotsman, The Guardian, Sunday Herald.
Sigrid Maria Elisabet Rausing is a Swedish philanthropist, anthropologist and publisher. She is the founder of the Sigrid Rausing Trust, one of the United Kingdom's largest philanthropic foundations, and owner of Granta magazine and Granta Books.
Paul Merlyn Buhle is an American historian, who is (retired) Senior Lecturer at Brown University, author or editor of 35 volumes, including histories of radicalism in the United States and the Caribbean, studies of popular culture, and a series of nonfiction comic art volumes. He is the authorized biographer of C. L. R. James.
Susan Jean Elisabeth "Zanny" Minton Beddoes is a British journalist. She is the editor-in-chief of The Economist, the first woman to hold the position. She began working for the magazine in 1994 as its emerging markets correspondent.
China Dialogue (中外对话) is an independent, non-profit organisation based in London and Beijing. It was launched on July 3, 2006. China Dialogue is funded by a range of institutional supporters, including several major charitable foundations.
Sarah Bartlett Churchwell is a professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK. Her expertise is in 20th- and 21st-century American literature and cultural history, especially the 1920s and 1930s. She has appeared on British television and radio and has been a judge for the Booker Prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. She is the director of the Being Human festival and the author of three books: The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe; Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby; and Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream. In April 2021, she was long listed for the Orwell Prize for Journalism.
Linda Yi-Chuang Yueh is a British/American economist, broadcaster, and author, born in Taiwan and of dual British and American citizenship. Yueh is an adjunct professor of economics at London Business School, and a Fellow in Economics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University. She was also a Visiting Professor at Peking University and associated with both the Centre for Economic Performance and IDEAS research centres at the London School of Economics (LSE). She is a TV and radio presenter, including for BBC programmes such as Radio 4 Analysis, Business Daily on BBC World Service, and Radio 4 Today programme. From 2013 to 2015, she was Chief Business Correspondent and a Contributing Editor for BBC News when she hosted Talking Business with Linda Yueh, as well as former Economics Editor at Bloomberg Television.
Ellah Wakatama, OBE, Hon. FRSL, is the Editor-at-Large at Canongate Books, a senior Research Fellow at Manchester University, and Chair of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. She was the founding Publishing Director of the Indigo Press. A London-based editor and critic, she was on the judging panel of the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award and the 2015 Man Booker Prize. In 2016, she was a Visiting Professor & Global Intercultural Scholar at Goshen College, Indiana, and was the Guest Master for the 2016 Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation international journalism fellowship in Cartagena, Colombia. The former deputy editor of Granta magazine, she was the senior editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House and an assistant editor at Penguin. She is the series editor of the Kwani? Manuscript Project and the editor of the anthologies Africa39 and Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction.
Gabriel Gbadamosi is a British poet, playwright and novelist of Irish-Nigerian descent. He is founding editor of the online literary platform WritersMosaic, an initiative of The Royal Literary Fund.
Isabel Oakeshott is a British political journalist.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
