Liz Cookman. Picture: Submitted
War correspondent is up there with astronaut and rockstar when it comes to unattainable jobs.
But Liz Cookman has made it in this most competitive of roles despite leaving state school in Tooting, South London, at 15 with no qualifications and spending the next decade working dead-end jobs.
She was named feature writer of the year at the British Journalism Awards in December for a portfolio of work published in the Guardian and Telegraph chronicling the human cost of war in Russia, Syria and Somalia.
The judges said: “The quality of writing and scope of her work made this a standout entry in a category where the quality of entries was incredibly high.”
Speaking from her home in Istanbul, Cookman talked about her long journey into journalism, her recent diagnosis with ADHD and the challenges of being a freelance foreign correspondent.
I also asked her why women appear to make such good war correspondents. Ramita Navai was also recognised at the British Journalism Awards for her reporting on Gaza while The Guardian’s Malak A Tantash won the Marie Colvin prize . The late Colvin was herself the doyenne of foreign correspondents.
“Women are better, I’m sorry, but they are because women often tend to focus on the human cost of war,” Cookman said.
“Men tend to be very focused on the logistics of war and the weapons and the troop movements and stuff. That is a big part of war, but war is also about the damage causes to society. That’s kind of the point of it.
“In certain regions all of the best correspondents are women, and that’s because, for example, in the Middle East, you have access to spaces that men don’t have.
“I think the fact that people don’t always take you seriously also works as a big advantage. I’ve got to the frontline in places where nobody was allowed to go to the frontline just because I was a woman, I was sat in the back of the car and nobody cared to look because I was a woman. You can really use people’s perceptions to your advantage.”
‘I found it all too much’
Cookman says she was a straight As student until she hit a crisis at the age of 15.
“I had terrible anxiety. I remember worrying about failing my GCSEs when I was, like, seven. It’s almost like I worried it into happening, and then I left school, and I didn’t really know what to do with myself.”
Matters were worsened by the fact her father became ill with degenerative brain disease Huntington’s.
She said: “I didn’t understand what was going on. I just knew that I found all of it too much. I didn’t have any GCSEs. Then, obviously, I didn’t get any A Levels either. I did try to go to, like, colleges, but nobody would take me because I didn’t have GCSEs.
“I did get a job at WH Smith, but I had to lie and say that I had GCSEs. And so I worked in shops, pubs and hospitality and stuff like that for decade.”
She managed to get into university after taking a foundation course in art whilst also working and took a degree in creative writing and visual design and then a masters in creative writing.
Bagged first (and only) staff journalism in UAE
“I always knew I wanted to be a journalist, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how somebody would do something like that…
“I tried bits of freelancing and I did little bits, but I just didn’t really know what I was doing or how the industry worked. I applied for loads of graduate schemes, and I applied for loads of internships and placements, but I just didn’t get anything. It was just so hard for me on the outside to even understand how anything works.
“So I sort of danced around the peripheries for ages. I moved to Turkey when I was 29 and I was still interested, but didn’t know how to go about it.
“I was teaching English, and then I got a job at a newspaper in the UAE called The National.”
She went freelance in 2020 and has been an independent foreign correspondent ever since. Her first foreign assignment saw her covering the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in Azerbaijan.
Knew Ukraine would be ‘one of the biggest stories of the decade’
In the first days of 2022 she relocated to Ukraine “because there was talk of a Russian invasion and it seemed like, if this unbelievable thing did happen, it would be one of the biggest stories this decade”.
After a couple of weeks in Kyiv she travelled to the frontline in the Donbas and then stayed in Mariupol for a month with her husband, a photographer, until the city was surrounded by Russian troops and they left through the last open checkpoint. She would stay in Ukraine full-time until August 2024.
“I covered the liberation of Kharkiv, the liberation of Kherson, the battle for Donbas, the Kherson dam explosion, the stolen children, the doomed counter-offensive, pretty much everything. But I always kept a bit of a focus on Mariupol, because I was so horrified at what happened there.”
Cookman has freelanced for Al Jazeera, The Guardian, The Times, The Sunday Times, Channel 4 News, The Observer and The Economist among others.
But she said complications around insurance can make it difficult for her to get commissions in conflict regions like Ukraine.
“I’ll be brutally honest. So many outlets have said to me ‘we can’t send you to this place, but if you go by yourself and then tell us you went, we might take the story, yeah’.”
She added: “For freelance foreign correspondents, essentially if you haven’t got the ability to just send yourself somewhere and take the hit of being extremely miserable and uncomfortable, staying in the worst conditions, having no money and basically not getting paid for your work, you’re not going to work.”
ADHD diagnosis: ‘I couldn’t stay at school but I could go to wars’
Cookman was diagnosed with ADHD in 2024 and “like most who discover this as adults, my whole life suddenly made sense”.
Like autism, ADHD is often under-diagnosed in women and is characterised by impulsiveness and challenges around executive function (how the brain manages daily tasks) – but also brings with it strengths which appear particularly suited to working as a journalist.
Cookman believes that many, if not most, of the other foreign correspondents she knows are also neurodivergent (often undiagnosed).
“It is a strength in that I am creative, able to think of unusual stories and angles (essential for selling freelance work) and hyper focus makes me obsessive about stories or topics.
“I am great and very calm in chaos, such as a warzone or crisis (it’s normal life I struggle with), and excel in fast, high-pressure environments. I think it also makes me a better writer as I bore easily.
“It is a weakness in that, for so many of us, finding a profession you love and can do without constantly getting bored or fired is huge. I couldn’t even stay at school but I could go to wars and manage teams and find good stories. It quickly becomes an identity.
“For that reason, I think we push ourselves too far, become too consumed with work at the cost of other stuff and go to burnout. And our passion makes us vulnerable to poor treatment /pay as the industry declines sharply. I am also terrible at filing for expenses and lose money all the time.”
In 2024 Press Gazette carried out research into neurodiversity in the media and found that out of 136 newsletter subscribers to fill out our survey, 64 considered themselves to be neurodiverse (with ADHD and autism by far the most common responses).
Cookman said: “Despite most of the industry being very neurodivergent, we’re not open about it and don’t address how to get the most out of people like… ourselves. We persist with working environments/systems/practices that don’t work for us, yet neurodivergent people have innate traits that are vital for good journalism.
“I think media outlets should actually stop hiring young people based on nonsense like the university they went to or opportunities scored from private school, and start screening for neurodivergence.”
Liz Cookman’s tips on writing
Cookman’s award-winning dispatch from Damascus for The Telegraph begins thus :
“Come! Come! We found more,” children shout, pulling a femur, a stretch of spine and a human skull from a pile of dusty rubble.
They start digging through the wreckage with their hands and pick out a singed vertebra. One small boy overturns a concrete brick and points to a murky stain. “Blood,” he says.
Many journalists can write well, a smaller group are great at finding stories. Cookman is clearly a member of the small subset who can do both.
Asked for her tips on writing, she said: “ For me, the intro is everything, once I have that then I know the tone of the story and flow. Some people do it last, but I get stuck until I’ve done it so it must come first.
“Friends often ask for help and my advice is to think about what details or scene sticks in your mind most – which anecdote would you tell your mum if you were speaking to her on the phone?
“Also, don’t overcomplicate things or try to include too much. You can always add information to a story, but trying to make lots of info into an engaging story is hard work.”
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