Award winning Australian foreign correspondent Sophie McNeill has been invited to deliver the Lancaster University 2009 Richardson Institute Annual Peace Lecture.
Sophie has covered some of the world’s most difficult and dangerous stories from areas such as Iraq, Kurdistan, Afghanistan (from where she recently covered the Presidential elections), Pakistan and Gaza and she has been based most recently in Jerusalem, Beirut and New York.
A political activist since the age of nine, at just 15, she made her first documentary, Awaiting Freedom – traveling alone to East Timor to film the health crisis crippling the country. The film received national praise and Sophie was named WA Young Person of the Year at age 16.
Regarded as a seasoned foreign correspondent although still just 23, currently working for Dateline SBS in Lebanon, her journalism has been praised as ‘exceptional’ by the celebrated journalist John Pilger.
Her talent and courage as a journalist and her commitment to tell the stories of those affected by conflict and injustice have been recognised in the wide range of awards she has received, including the highest award for an Australian journalist – the Walkley Young Australian Journalist of the Year 2008 – for her film, Palestine: Divided it Falls, made for SBS.
“Going to another country alone, let alone a war-torn country where women are not well received showed a lot of courage and confidence,” said the judges of the film. “She certainly has the courage and sense of justice needed to make a great journalist [and] is a fine example of why we need to start thinking globally.”
She was also awarded Western Australia’s Young Person of the Year Award (when she was just 16), was a New York Film Festival finalist in 2006 and was honoured as the 2008 Young Woman of the Year and Journalist of the Year, an award given by Australia’s women’s magazine YEN.
This is the fourth annual peace lecture at the Richardson Institute which was established in 1959 as the first peace research centre in Britain. The inaugural lecture was given by the renowned Middle East correspondent of The Independent Robert Fisk, who is an alumnus of Lancaster University. It was standing room only at a packed last year’s peace lecture which was delivered by the veteran political campaigner Tony Benn.
• Sophie’s free public lecture called ‘Reporting from conflict zones: telling the stories of the victims’ will be held at Lancaster University (Management School Lecture Theatre 8) on Thursday 15th October,6.00-8.00pm.
• For more information about the Richardson Institute for Peace and Conflict Research visit: www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/centres/richinst/