Media Masters - Amelia Gentleman Media Masters

Amelia Gentleman is a multi-award winning Guardian journalist, and famously uncovered the scandal of West Indian immigrants and their families being threatened with deportation, subsequently writing ‘The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment’. A graduate of Wadham College, Oxford, she reported from New Delhi for the International Herald Tribune before moving to the Guardian, as correspondent in Paris then Moscow. She then became a feature writer for the paper, and in late 2017 received an initial email tip-off which led to six months’ work charting the Windrush scandal, leading ultimately to the resignation of the Home Secretary. Amelia has won some of the most prestigious awards in British journalism, including the Orwell Prize, the Paul Foot Award and the Cudlipp Award, with several organisations naming her ‘Journalist of the Year’; her book was long-listed for the Baillie Gifford prize in 2019. In this in-depth interview, she describes the terrible cost of the government’s failures for the lives of the Windrush community, shares anecdotes about the life-and-death nature of reporting in Russia, and discusses how the freedom of being a feature writer allows her to focus on stories for which she has passion and interest.