Nesrine Malik

Nesrine Malik is a Sudanese-born, London-based columnist and commentator. She writes for The Guardian and is a panellist on BBC's Dateline London.

Malik was born in Khartoum, Sudan and educated in the country. She attended the American University in Cairo and the University of Khartoum, following which she completed her graduate studies at the University of London. Alongside her career as a journalist, she spent ten years in emerging markets private equity. Her work focuses on Islamophobia, and has been quoted by New York magazine and the New York Times for her comments in The Guardian after the Charlie Hebdo shooting, a topic which she also spoke about on BBC Newsnight alongside David Aaronovitch of The Times and Myriam François-Cerrah of the New Statesman. Malik's Foreign Policy columns and dispatches are focused on Sudanese politics.

In 2015, Malik and Peter Hitchens discussed the role of the hijab and Muslim cultural identity in Britain on Channel 4 News. In 2016, Malik was one of three columnists featured in The Guardian's "The Web We Want" series discussing online abuse and negative comments they had received online regarding their work. Following this, she contributed to a session at the British parliament with the aim of tackling the chilling effect online abuse has on emerging writers.

In 2017, she was nominated 'Journalist/Writer of the Year' by the Diversity in Media Awards. In the same year, she was awarded Society and Diversity Commentator of the Year at the Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards . In 2018, journalist Peter Oborne in the British Journalism Review described Malik as writing "with wit and punch about race, class and gender, as well as Islam". He described her as an example of a rising generation of politicised Muslim journalists who "use their identities to shed light on the inequalities in British society. They treat Islam as a political identity as much as a religious one. Being Muslim gives this millennial generation an air not of religious but of political defiance. For them, it is a tool for showing that Britain remains a country dominated by a small group of people."

In 2019, the Orwell Foundation longlisted Malik for the Orwell Prize for her work on Britain's "social evils" in "exposing the hostile environment". Later that year she was shortlisted as 'Comment Journalist of the Year' at the British Journalism Awards . That year, she wrote We Need New Stories, a work which discusses British culture wars regarding university syllabuses, gender and racial politics, freedom of speech, false perceptions of "political correctness gone mad", British nationalism and imperial nostalgia, and Brexit. It has been praised by Bidisha in The Guardian for its ability to stay "refreshingly clear of journalese ... the book resembles a solid work of social science or political philosophy more than a common grab bag of extended articles. [Malik] has an excellent nose for hypocrisy and doublethink, the crude prejudices and bigotry that underlie political decisions."