BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.
Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast.
Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks,
book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
And for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast.
I hope you enjoy listening.
My castaway this week is the journalist Lindsay Hilsum.
She's been a foreign correspondent for the past four decades and Channel 4 News international editor for 22 years.
During that time, she's reported from every continent except Antarctica,
covering the major conflicts of our time and winning numerous awards for her work.
She has a reputation for bringing clarity and insight to complex stories,
as well as an eye for the human details that help her coverage resonate with viewers at home.
She grew up in Worcestershire with a keen desire to see the world.
Starting out as an aid worker in Guatemala and Haiti,
she soon began working as a freelance writer alongside her humanitarian work.
That's how, in April 1994, while she was working for an NGO in Kigali,
she found herself the only English-speaking journalist present to witness the horror of Rwanda's genocide
as it began.
In 1996, she was named Amnesty International Journalist of the Year for her reporting.
She also testified at the Rwandan War Crimes Tribunal the following year.