Nick Davies is a freelance journalist, working regularly as special correspondent for the Guardian. In the last few years, he was centrally involved in the publication of secret US logs and cables obtained by Wikileaks and in exposing the phone-hacking scandal in Rupert Murdoch's newspaper empire.
He is now working on a book about Murdoch and the hacking affair, due to be published in the UK, US, Canada, China and Western Europe when related criminal trials are finished, probably during 2014.
In 35 years as a reporter, he has specialised in long-term projects, investigating crime, failing schools, poverty, drugs laws and news media.
He has been named journalist of the year, feature writer of the year and reporter of the year in British press awards and has won the special awards for investigative reporting which are given in memory of Martha Gellhorn, Paul Foot and Tony Bevins. He is an honorary doctor of literature at the London School of Economics and an honorary fellow of the University of Westminster and Goldsmiths College, London.
In June 2010, he initiated the alliance of news organisations which published US military and diplomatic secrets which had been obtained by Wikileaks. That series provoked a global debate about US foreign policy and led to the Guardian winning the award of Newspaper of the Year. It is the subject of a film currently in production with Dreamworks.
Between July 2009 and July 2011, he wrote more than a hundred Guardian stories about crime in Rupert Murdoch's News of the World and about the failure of British governments, police and press regulators to hold Murdoch to account. This led to six different police inquiries in England and Scotland, a series of arrests and criminal trials, and to the establishing of Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry into the culture and practices of the press. His work on this subject has won eight awards including the German Henri Nannen award for press freedom and the award as journalist of the year from the Foreign Press Association in London.
He has published five books: White Lies, investigating a racist miscarriage of justice in Texas; Murder on Ward Four, exposing weaknesses in the National Health Service through a nurse's attacks on children; Dark Heart, uncovering the scale and origins of UK poverty in stories from crack houses and street gangs; School Report, analysing the failure of government education policy; and Flat Earth News, a controversial account of falsehood, distortion and propaganda in quality news media, which won the first Bristol Festival of Ideas book award.
He has written feature films and makes TV documentaries; he was formerly an on-screen reporter for World In Action.
He also teaches. Hundreds of reporters in Britain, Canada, South Africa, India and China have attended his one-day masterclass in the skills of investigative work.
For an archive of stories and books by Nick Davies, go to www.nickdavies.net.