Christina Lamb

Christina Lamb OBE is one of Britain's leading foreign correspondents. She has been named Foreign Correspondent of the Year five times in the British Press Awards and What the Papers Say Awards and in 2007 was winner of the Prix Bayeux Calvados - one of the world's most prestigious prizes for war correspondents, for her reporting from Afghanistan.

She has won numerous other awards starting with Young Journalist of the Year in the British Press Awards for her coverage of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1988; was part of the News Reporter of the year for BCCI; and won the Foreign Press Association award for reporting on Zimbabwean teachers forced into prostitution, and Amnesty International award for the plight of street children in Rio.

She was named by Grazia magazine as one of their Icons of the Decade and by She magazine as one of Britain's Most Inspirational Women. The ASHA foundation chose her as one of their inspirational women worldwide with her portrait featuring in a special exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery. Her portrait has also been in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. She was awarded the OBE in the 2013 New Years Honours.

As a roving Foreign Affairs Correspondent for the Sunday Times, she has been a foreign correspondent for more than 20 years, living in Pakistan, Brazil and South Africa first for the Financial Times then the Sunday Times. She has also spent a year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard 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 Ð: Pakistans struggle for democracy"; and "The Sewing Circles of Herat, My Afghan Years," which was runner up as Best Non-Fiction book in the Barnes & Noble Great New Writers Awards. Her most recent book is "Small Wars Permitting: Despatches from Foreign Lands," a collection of her reportage. Christina also spent much time with inspirational teenager Malala Yousafzai and contributed to her book, "I Am Malala."

A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and inveterate traveler, she was educated at Oxford University from which she holds a degree in politics, philosophy and economics. She is married with a young son and lives between London and Portugal.

Aside from the Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph, and Financial Times, Christina’s work has appeared in the New York Times, New Statesman, Spectator, Time magazine and Conde Nast Traveller. As the first journalist to have access to the transcripts of interrogations of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, her investigation was the subject of an ABC Nightline program. She was one of the journalists interviewed by Oliver North for his program on war correspondents in his Fox TV series "War Stories" and featured in Lou Hamilton’s film "War Women." She is a frequent commentator on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Zimbabwe on radio and television in Britain, Canada, Australia and the US and has given talks to schools, MPs, NATO and the military, and taught literary non-fiction at the Arvon Foundation. Christina is also a regular newspaper reviewer on Sky TV.

She is on the board of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and a patron of the charities Afghan Connection and Hope for Children. Her work inspired the book "Zahir" of multi-million selling author Paulo Coelho.