Robert Fisk is “the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain,” according to The New York Times. He is the Middle East correspondent of the London Independent and has won more than 20 major British and international journalism awards for his reporting from the region. He is the author of several bestselling books, including Pity the Nation, an eyewitness account of the Lebanese Civil War, and the historical volume The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. In 2006, he was awarded the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Prize for Cultural Freedom from the Lannan Foundation.
First for The Times of London and then for The Independent, Fisk has been reporting from the Middle East for nearly 40 years, covering everything from the Lebanese Civil War in the 1980s to the Israeli invasions of Lebanon. He was among the first Western journalists to report the massacre at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. He also witnessed and reported from the Iranian Revolution (1979), the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979), the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), the Algerian Civil War (1990–1998), the US-Iraqi Gulf War (1991), the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts (1992–1995, 1998), the American attack on Afghanistan (2001), and the US invasion of Iraq (2003). He covered many of the 2011 Arab revolutions, especially Egypt, and is today reporting from the civil war in Syria.
He is the only journalist to have interviewed Osama bin Laden three times—first in Sudan and then in Al-Qaeda’s secret camps in Afghanistan.
Born in England in 1946, Fisk holds a BA in English and Linguistics from Lancaster University in the UK, and a PhD in Politics from Trinity College, University of Dublin. He has received 17 honorary doctorates from British, Canadian, and other universities. He is a frequent broadcaster and lecturer around the world.
Fisk is the author of five books, including two works on Irish history, one of them an account of Irish neutrality in the Second World War; it remains a bestseller. Outside of the Middle East, Fisk has written and lectured extensively on the First and Second World Wars. He was the first Englishman to be invited to give a lecture to the families of Irish Catholics killed by British soldiers on Bloody Sunday.
He remains based in Beirut as The Independent’s Middle East correspondent and is currently working on a new history of the region called Night of Power.
