David Loyn

David Loyn has been a foreign correspondent for 30 years, mostly with the BBC. Among other prizes he is one of only two journalists to have won both of Britain’s leading awards in television and radio news – Sony Radio Reporter of the Year and Royal Television Society Journalist of the Year.

His first book, Frontline, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2006. His reporting highlights include the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in East Germany, Hungary and Romania. After reporting on India since the assassination of Indira Gandhi and riots in India in 1984, he later returned to succeed Mark Tully as the BBC Correspondent in Delhi. He has spent long periods travelling with guerrilla forces including separatists in Kashmir and Sri Lanka, Maoists in India and Nepal, and the Taliban in Afghanistan since their origins in the mid-90s.

He was the only foreign correspondent with the Taliban when they took Kabul in 1996 and returned to spend time behind enemy lines reporting with the Taliban in Helmand in October 2006. He had several assignments in Iraq, including a two-month embed with US Marines during the invasion in 2003, and had several embeds with British forces, including the deployment of the Black Watch to Camp Dogwood in October 2004.

David Loyn’s acclaimed The Long War – The Inside Story of America and Afghanistan Since 9/11 was published by St Martin's Press in the US and UK in 2021.

Elliott & Thompson will publish his Mapmakers – How Britain Drew the Borders of the Modern World in 2025.