Hello, I'm Jessie Williams, a freelance multimedia journalist and writer based in London.

 

My interest lies in global current affairs, humanitarian issues, women's rights, migration, culture, and politics - with the aim of exploring the human stories behind the headlines. I have worked on a diverse array of stories which have taken me around the world, from walking through minefields in Lebanon, to visiting refugee camps in Iraq to speak to girls finding freedom through sport, covering the 2023 elections in Turkey, shadowing a psychologist helping displaced children process trauma in Armenia, and speaking to women fleeing war and domestic abuse in Ukraine. Closer to home, I've investigated the UK's asylum-seeker housing and treatment of migrant survivors of domestic abuse, interviewed the new lost generation of Covid-19, and exposed a French university's #MeToo reckoning.

 

My work has been published in TIME Magazine, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, Foreign Policy, BBC News, The i Paper, Al Jazeera, The Economist, The Independent, The Telegraph, VICE World News, The Observer Magazine, openDemocracy, The Fuller Project, Financial Times, Huck Magazine, The New Arab, DAWN Journal, Middle East Eye, Dazed, ELLE UK, BBC Travel, The Globe and Mail, Refinery29, and others.

 

I also do copywriting, photography, and write a sporadic newsletter. Previously, I worked as a co-producer on a project for BBC Arabic, and before that I was an assistant editor, staff writer, and podcast co-host at Restless Magazine. 

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I have a First Class degree in Journalism from City, University of London, and spent a year on exchange at Sciences Po Paris, Campus de Reims in France. I am HEFAT certified. 

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Currently, I'm working on a book proposal, and am represented by Aevitas Creative Management. 

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Awards & Acknowledgements 

2024 - Finalist for the Wallace House Center for Journalists Livingston Award, for international reporting. 

2023 - Finalist for the Nonprofit News Breaking Barriers Award.

2023 - Judge for the Student Journalist category of the Amnesty Media Awards.

2022 - Winner of MHP Mischief's 30 To Watch Young Journalist Award in the international affairs category. 

2021 - Shortlisted for the British Journalism Awards in the social affairs, diversity and inclusion category.

2020 - Shortlisted for the Freelance Writing Awards.

2020 - Longlisted for One World Media's Coronavirus Reporting Award.

2019 - Finalist in the Student Journalist category of the Amnesty Media Awards.

2019 - Longlisted for the London Short Story Prize.

2013 - Finalist in British Vogue's annual writing competition.

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"My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does.”
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

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