Laura Heaton is an award-winning writer and journalist based between the Democratic Republic of Congo and the UK. Her writing in East and Central Africa over the past decade has focused primarily on conflict, human rights, and women’s experiences in war.

Most recently, Laura’s feature story for Foreign Policy Magazine titled “The Watson Files” told the story of retracing the steps of a British scientist in Somalia in the 1980s to see how the environment has changed after a quarter century of war. Working with U.S. Ambassador Swanee Hunt, she wrote a book about the role of women’s leadership in the rebuilding of post-genocide Rwanda. Rwandan Women Rising was published by Duke University Press in May 2017. Laura is currently ghostwriting the joint memoir of a couple living in Hong Kong, while experimenting with poetry and fiction for her master’s in creative writing at Cambridge.

Laura’s reporting has appeared in a variety of U.S. and international outlets, including The New York Times, National Public Radio, Newsweek, National Geographic, and the International Review of the Red Cross, a journal published by Cambridge University Press. She was a 2017 Climate Change Reporting Fellow with the GroundTruth Project, and her reporting and writing has been recognized with awards from the Society of Environmental Journalists, American Society for Journalists and Authors, the Overseas Press Club, and the Scripps Howard Foundation. She is represented by The Wylie Agency in New York.

CONTACT: laura.heaton(at)gmail.com 

Photos by Laura Heaton unless otherwise credited