Humphrey Hawksley

Humphrey Hawksley is an English journalist and author who has been a foreign correspondent for the BBC since the early 1980s.

Hawksley was educated at the Junior and Senior schools of St. Lawrence College, an independent school for boys (now co-educational) in Ramsgate, Kent.

After school, Hawksley joined the Merchant Navy, and sailed across the world. He joined the BBC in the early 1980s.

In 1986, Hawksley was expelled from Sri Lanka where he had reported on a number of government atrocities in its conflict with Tamil separatists. In 1987 he covered violence in the Philippines and received death threats. In 1989 after the killings in Tiananmen Square he went to Hong Kong and reported on social stresses due to the country's imminent transfer to Chinese rule. He was simultaneously a reporter for the whole of Asia. He later covered this transfer live in Beijing. In 1994, he opened the BBC's first television bureau in China. Hawksley has reported on fighting in The Balkans, Iraq and Timor. Hawksley has also reported on slavery in cocoa production.

Hawksley has written extensively in newspapers including The Guardian and The Times.

Non-fiction

• Democracy Kills: What's So Good About Having the Vote? (2010)
• Asian Waters (2018)

Fiction

Hawksley is the author of political novels aimed at raising key strategic issues in the far east before a broader audience.

• Dragon Strike, co-authored with Simon Holberton (1997)
• Ceremony of Innocence (1998)
• Absolute Measures (1999)
• Dragon Fire (2000)
• Red Spirit (2001)
• The Third World War (2003)
• The History Book (2007, re-released as Security Breach in 2008)
• Man on Ice (2018)
• Man on Edge (2019)
• Home Run
• Friends and Enemies