Caroline Moorehead

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Caroline Moorehead is a human rights journalist and biographer.

Contents

[edit] Biographical Work

Moorehead has written five biographies, of Bertrand Russell, Heinrich Schliemann, Freya Stark, Iris Origo, and most recently, the life of Martha Gellhorn, the wife of novelist Ernest Hemingway. Besides being the wife of Hemingway, Gellhorn was a famous war reporter--unprecedented for a woman in the 1930s -- her job was to travel to the most dangerous hot spots in the world. She chased ambulances through civil-war-torn Spain, holed up in Helsinki during the Soviet bombing raids and rode clandestine supply flights along Burma Road when Britain was fortifying China against the Japanese. And she did it with style -- a striking young blonde with intense eyes and movie-star legs, she was witty, acutely intelligent and fiercely ambitious. To use a phrase from her era, she could drink with the guys.

[edit] Non-Fiction Books

Moorehead also wrote a number of non-fiction pieces centered on human rights including a history of the International Committee fo the Red Cross, Dunant's Dream, based on previously unseen archives inGeneva, Troublesome People, a book on pacifists, and a work on terrorism, Hostages to Fortune. Her most recent work is on refugees in the modern world named Human Cargo, published in 2004.

[edit] Journalism

She wrote many book reviews for assorted papers and reviews. These include the TLS, Literary Review, Telegraph, Independent, Spectator and New York Review of Books. She specialized in human rights as a journalist, contributing a column first to the Times and then the Independent, and co-producing and writing a series of programs on human rights for BBC television.

[edit] Projects

She is a trustee and director of Index on Censorship, and a governor of the British Institute of Human Rights. She has served on the committees of the Royal Society of Literature, of which she is a Fellow, the Society of Authors, English PEN and the London Library. She also helped start a legal advice centre for asylum seekers from the Horn of Africa in Cairo, where she helps run a number of educational projects.

[edit] Resources