John Hooper

John Hooper is currently the Rome correspondent for the Economist and the Guardian. Born in 1950, Hooper was educated at St Benedict’s Abbey in London and St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. At the age of eighteen, he travelled to Biafra during the Nigerian civil war to make a television documentary. Since then, he has spent more than 20 years as a foreign correspondent, working for - among others - the Economist, the Guardian, the Observer, BBC, NBC and Reuters. For several years in London, he was a presenter of BBC World Service’s ‘Twenty Four Hours’ current affairs programme.For three years, he covered Spain’s eventful transformation from a dictatorship into a democracy. That posting and another, from 1988 to 1994, produced two books on Spain for Penguin, The Spaniards, which won the Allen Lane award for 1987, and its successor, The New Spaniards.In 1997, he uncovered the so-called “ship of death” migrant trafficking disaster and was a member of the award-winning Observer team that investigated its aftermath.