Mark Lowen

Mark Lowen is the Turkey correspondent for BBC News, based in Istanbul, and formerly reported from Athens and Belgrade. He became BBC Turkey correspondent in 2014 and is often deployed elsewhere on major stories.

Lowen was educated at Sheen Mount Primary School in Richmond upon Thames from which he obtained a Scholarship in 1994 to King's College School, an independent school for boys in Wimbledon, followed by Balliol College at the University of Oxford,

where he obtained a First in History and French.

Lowen joined the BBC's Paris Bureau in 2005 as an intern, becoming a producer, followed by the BBC World Service in London in 2007 and BBC World News in 2008. He became BBC Balkans correspondent, based in Belgrade, in 2009, covering the former republics of Yugoslavia and Albania, during which time he reported on the first elections in Kosovo since independence, the trial of Radovan Karadžić, the arrest of the former Commander-in-Chief of the Bosnian Serb Army, Ratko Mladić, and the campaigning for, and outcome of, the Albanian elections.

Lowen became BBC Athens correspondent in autumn 2011, replacing Malcolm Brabant, who had become seriously ill following a routine inoculation against Yellow Fever. He covered Greece's financial crisis in depth, before moving to Istanbul in 2014.

Lowen is the grandson of Natalia Karp, née Weissman (1911-2007), a Jewish refugee from the Nazis and Holocaust survivor, whose story he told in a BBC broadcast and online report.