Nick Davies is a freelance journalist, working regularly as special correspondent for The Guardian. He was centrally involved in the publication of secret US logs and cables obtained by Wikileaks and in exposing the phone-hacking scandal in Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire; he initiated the alliance which published the documents. That series provoked a global debate about US foreign policy and led to the Guardian winning the award of Newspaper of the Year. He is now working on a book about Murdoch and the hacking affair, due to be published in the UK, US, Canada, China and Western Europe when related criminal trials are concluded. His work on this subject has won eight awards including the German Henri Nannen award for press freedom and the award as journalist of the year from the Foreign Press Association in London. Davies has been named journalist of the year, feature writer of the year and reporter of the year in British press awards and has won the special awards for investigative reporting which are given in memory of Martha Gellhorn, Paul Foot and Tony Bevins. He is an honorary doctor of literature at the London School of Economics and an honorary fellow of the University of Westminster and Goldsmiths College, London. Besides writing feature films and TV documentaries, he has published five books: White Lies, investigating a racist miscarriage of justice in Texas; Murder on Ward Four, exposing weaknesses in the National Health Service through a nurse’s attacks on children; Dark Heart, uncovering the scale and origins of UK poverty in stories from crack houses and street gangs; School Report, analyzing the failure of government education policy; and Flat Earth News, a controversial account of falsehood, distortion and propaganda in quality news media, which won the first Bristol Festival of Ideas book award.
(Spring 2013)