| Isabel Hilton, OBE | |
| Birth Place: | Aberdeen, Scotland |
| Birth Date: | 1947 11, df=yes |
| Alma Mater: | University of Edinburgh |
Isabel Nancy Hilton OBE (born 25 November 1947) is a Scottish journalist and broadcaster, based in London.
Hilton attended school in Alford, Aberdeenshire, Bradford Girls' Grammar School (Yorkshire) and Walnut Hills High School (Cincinnati, Ohio). She graduated from Edinburgh University, where she studied Chinese to post-graduate level, subsequently studying at Beijing Languages Institute and Fudan University, Shanghai. In 1976, she briefly served as secretary of the Scotland-China Association, based at her University, and was placed on MI5's "black" list, which prevented her from accepting a job offer with the BBC in 1976.[1]
Over a long career in national and international print, online and broadcast media, Isabel Hilton has covered global politics, conflict, development, human rights, climate change and environmental degradation. In recent years her work has focussed on the impacts of a rising China with particular emphasis on climate change and China's global environmental footprint.
In addition to her writing career, she has made several radio and television documentaries and presented both BBC's Radio 4 current affairs programme The World Tonight and Radio 3's arts and cultural strand, Night Waves. Hilton joined Scottish Television as a presenter in 1976, moving later that year to the Daily Express as feature writer after being blacklisted by MI5 from a job at the BBC. She left the Daily Express five months later to join the Sunday Times where she subsequently held posts as feature writer, news reporter, Insight reporter and Latin America editor. She covered the Falklands War from Buenos Aires in 1982 and continued to cover Latin America until the Sunday Times became embroiled in the dispute over its move to Wapping. She left the Sunday Times to join the founding team at The Independent as Latin America Editor. In 1989 she became Europe Editor, covering the fall of communism in Europe, then Chief Feature Writer.In 1994 she left The Independent to work on a book, whilst also taking up a new role as presenter of The World Tonight (1995–98) on BBC Radio 4, and from 1999 as presenter of Nightwaves on BBC Radio 3. She contributed a regular column to The Guardian 1997–2003) and from 2000 to 2003 was also a staff writer on the New Yorker magazine, reporting from Latin America, South Asia and Europe. From March 2005 to July 2007, she was editor and then editor-in-chief of openDemocracy.net. In 2006 Hilton founded Chinadialogue, a fully bilingual not-for-profit newsroom dedicated to covering climate change with a particular focus on China. This was followed in 2010 by the Third Pole and later by www.dialogochino.net and www.chinadialogueocean.net. Hilton served as editor and CEO of the organisation, publishing reports from China, Latin America, east, south and Southeast Asia and the United States in a total of eleven languages. In 2021 she stepped back from her role as CEO to become Senior Adviser to the organisation, finally stepping down from that role in 2023. In January 2023 Hilton became a contributing editor at Prospect Magazine.Hilton's written work has also appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New Statesman, The Economist, Granta, the Mail on Sunday, the Observer, the Financial Times, El Pais, Le Monde, La Stampa, Lettres Internationale, International Affairs, The World Today, The New European, Index on Censorship, Vogue (British and American), The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, the Times Literary Supplement, Foreign Policy The Literary Review, the London Review of Books, China File, Foreign Policy and many others.
Her television and radio documentaries include:
She also reported several shorter films for BBC 2's Correspondent series. Hilton's radio documentaries include The Bitter Pill, The Gesar Epic, Flowers in the Backyard, The Chinese Media, The Return of Faith, The End of Empire, The Uses of History in China, The Shadow of the Emperor.
In 2007, Hilton delivered the Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture at Somerset House, London; in 2019, she delivered the annual James Cameron memorial lecture at City, University of London[2] on the subject: Journalism with Chinese characteristics: reflections on media in the new era. In 2022 she delivered the Sue Lloyd-Roberts Memorial Lecture.
Hilton is married to Neal Ascherson, with whom she has a son and a daughter. She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2009 Birthday Honours. She holds an Honorary Doctorate from Bradford University and an Honorary Doctorate of the university from Stirling University.Hilton is an active participant in a number of track 2 dialogues and meetings, including Konigswinter, the Club of Three, the UK Canada Symposium and the British American Project. She has spoken at the World Economic Forum (China) and the Munich Security Forum and served as speaker of the jury for the Berlin Based Lettres Ulysses Award for Literary Reportage from 2001 – 2006, as a judge on Amnesty International’s Media Awards, the Kurt Schock Awards and the James Cameron Awards. She chaired the jury of the George Orwell Prize for Journalism 2022.
She is a regular discussion host at festivals and events, including How the Light Gets In and Web Summit (Lisbon), and as a commentator on Monocle Radio, BBC and other outlets, as a featured speaker in London Climate Week (2021), the FT Festival, the Edinburgh Book Festival and many others.
Past positions include:
She has also served as a member of the editorial board of International Affairs, the advisory board of the Latin America Bureau, the advisory board of the European Movement, the advisory board of the Association of Speakers of Chinese as a Second Language, and the editorial advisory board of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism,
Hilton chairs the board of the Centre for Investigative Journalism. She co-chairs the board of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and is a non-executive director of E3G, the climate think tank.