Jonathan Freedland

Jonathan Freedland is an award-winning journalist, author and broadcaster. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian and is the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s contemporary history series, The Long View. He also writes a monthly piece for the Jewish Chronicle and is a regular contributor to a range of US publications, including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The New Republic. In 2008 he was awarded the David Watt Prize for Journalism, having been named ‘Columnist of the Year’ in the What the Papers Say awards for 2002, where the judges praised him for his “incisive, original, strong and very outspoken views”.
He is the author of six books, two of them non-fiction under his own name. The first, Bring Home the Revolution, was both acclaimed, winning a Somerset Maugham Award, and controversial: it argued that Britain was in dire need of a constitutional and cultural overhaul, one that could learn much from America. The book was later adapted into a TV series for BBC Two. In 2005, he published Jacob’s Gift, a memoir telling the stories of three generations of his own family, as well as exploring wider questions of identity and belonging.
Since 2006 he has published four best-selling novels under the pseudonym Sam Bourne. The first, The Righteous Men, became a Number One bestseller in the UK and went on to win a Gold Book Award after selling more than 500,000 copies. It has been translated into 30 languages. That was followed by The Last Testament (2007), The Final Reckoning (2008) and The Chosen One (2010).
Before 1997, Jonathan served for four years as the Guardian’s Washington Correspondent and the US remains an area of specialist interest, along with the politics of Britain and the Middle East. Earlier in his career, he worked as a reporter for The Washington Post, for BBC News – chiefly for Radio 4’s Today and World at One programmes but also for Radio 1’s Newsbeat – and for the Sunday Correspondent newspaper. In 1998 he was the presenter of the short-lived Channel 4 series, Zeitgeist.
He was educated at Wadham College, Oxford – where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) and edited the university newspaper, Cherwell – and, earlier, at University College School, London.