Patrick Cockburn is Foreign Commentator of the Year

Independent foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn, Foreign Commentator of the Year (Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards 2013)

Patrick Cockburn of The Independent and The Independent on Sunday has won the Editorial Intelligence Comment Award 2013 for Foreign Commentator of the Year.

Since 1990, Patrick Cockburn has been contributing clear-sighted comment and rigorous reporting for The Independent titles. His weekly dispatch in The Independent on Sunday, whether from Egypt, Iraq or from his own desk in the UK drawing on his decades of experience, is fearless, unspun and unmissable.

Cockburn was Middle East Correspondent of the Financial Times before he joined The Independent in 1990 to cover the Gulf War and was then, successively, Washington, Jerusalem and Moscow Correspondent up to 2002. He has written two current affairs books and The Occupation was recently listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Broken Boy, a memoir, was published by Jonathan Cape and Vintage. ‘Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq’ was published in 2008, and in 2011 Simon and Schuster published ‘Henry’s Demons’.

Unable to pick up his award in person, because he is (of course) on the road – this time in Iraq – he asked Independent on Sunday editor Lisa Markwell to accept on his behalf and thank the judges and his esteemed fellow shortlisted commentators.

One of the judges, Claire Fox, director of The Institute of Ideas, said that when she reads Patrick Cockburn’s columns in The Independent on Sunday, “it always changes the way I think about the subject. [He is] brilliantly insightful with critical edge.”