John Simpson CBE

John Simpson CBE is the BBC's World Affairs Editor.  He has worked for the BBC since 1966 in a variety of roles including Foreign Correspondent and Political Editor and has reported from over 140 countries.  He has twice been the Royal Television Society's Journalist of the Year, first in 1991 for his coverage of the Gulf War in Baghdad, and again in 2000 for his reporting from Belgrade during the NATO bombing campaign. In capacity as BBC World Affairs Editor, he is now the presenter of his very own critically acclaimed new show Unspun World with John Simpson.

John's books include Strange Places, Questionable People; A Mad World, My Masters (Macmillan, 2008), News From No Mans Land (Macmillan, 2008), The War Against Saddam: Taking the Hard Road to Baghdad  (Macmillan,2004) and Unreliable Sources (Macmillan, 2011), takes an in-depth look at the way we've reported major world events over the century.

We Chose to Speak of War and Strife (Bloomsbury, 2017) brings us pivotal moments in our history "from the Crimean War to Vietnam; the siege of Sarajevo to the fall of Baghdad" through the eyes of those who risked life and limb to witness them first hand, and the astonishing tales of what it took to report them. 

In his first novel Moscow Midnight (John Murray, 2018) Jon Swift's close friend, MP Patrick Macready is found dead in his flat. Unsatisfied with the police's conclusion, Swift is drawn into a violent underworld, where whispers of conspiracies, assassinations and double-agents start blurring the line between friend and foe.

Jon Swift's story continues in his most recent novel, Our Friends in Beijing (John Murray 2021). Travelling to China, Jon starts to follow a tangled web in which it is hard to know who he can trust. Under the watchful eyes of an international network of spies, double-agents and politicians, all with a ruthless desire for power, Jon is in a high-stakes race to expose the truth, before it’s too late.