Gary Younge

Younge grew up in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, where he was born.[3] He is of Barbadian extraction.[4]

In 1984, aged 15, he briefly joined the Young Socialists, the youth section of the Workers Revolutionary Party, but left a year later after harassment from other party members, including allegedly being accused of working for MI5 and claims that he supported Fidel Castro only because of his ethnicity.[5] At the age of 17, Younge went to teach English in a United Nations Eritrean refugee school in Sudan with the educational charity Project Trust.[6]

In the late 1980s, he attended Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, where he studied French and Russian,[7] and was elected Vice President (Welfare) of the Student Association, a paid sabbatical post he held for a year.[8]

In his final year at university he was awarded a bursary from The Guardian to study journalism at City University, and after a short internship at Yorkshire Television he joined The Guardian in 1993, and has since reported from all over Europe, Africa, the US and the Caribbean.[6]

His book, No Place like Home, in which he retraced the route of the civil rights Freedom Riders, was published in 1999 and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His subsequent books are Stranger in a Strange Land: Encounters in the Disunited States (2006), Who Are We – And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? (2011), The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dream (2013), and most recently Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (2016), which in 2017 won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize from Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism.[6]

In the 2020 Powerlist, Younge was listed in the Top 100 of the most influential people in the UK from African/African-Caribbean descent.[9] The same year saw Younge become professor of sociology at Manchester University.[10]

In 2011, he relocated to Chicago, where he lived with his wife Tara Mack, his son Osceola and daughter Zora until returning to Britain in 2015.[6] In 2015, he announced his intention to move to Hackney,[11] and now lives in London with his wife and two children.[6] His brother Pat Younge is chief creative officer of BBC Vision.[12]

• 2007: Honorary doctorate from Heriot-Watt University[13]
• 2007: Honorary doctorate from London South Bank University[14]
• 2009: James Cameron award for the "combined moral vision and professional integrity" of his coverage of the Barack Obama election campaign[15][16]
• 2015: Foreign Commentator of the Year by The Comment Awards[17]
• 2015: David Nyhan Prize for political journalism from Harvard University's Shorenstein Center[18]
• 2016: Sandford Award, "for radio, TV and online programmes that reflect religious, spiritual or ethical themes"[19]
• 2016: Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS)[20]
• 2017: Honorary doctorate from Cardiff University[21]
• 2017: James Aaronson Career Achievement Award from Hunter College, City University of New York

• No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey Through the American South. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi. 2002. ISBN 9781578064885. OCLC 49226176.
• Stranger in a Strange Land: Encounters in the Disunited States. New York: New Press. 2006. ISBN 9781595580689. OCLC 62421357.
• Who Are We – And Should It Matter in the 21st Century?. New York: Nation Books. 2011. ISBN 9781568586601. OCLC 663952482.
• The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dream. Chicago: Haymarket Books. 2013. ISBN 9781608463220. OCLC 829740195.
• Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives. New York: Nation Books. 2016. ISBN 9781568589756. OCLC 945232454.

• Official website
• Column archive at The Guardian
  • Memoirs of a teenage Trot, The Guardian, 19 February 2000
• Column archive at The Nation
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Works by or about Gary Younge in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Article archive at Journalisted
• Gary Younge at Curlie

Media related to Gary Younge at Wikimedia Commons