Samira Shackle is a multi-award-winning freelance journalist, author and editor.
She is a regular contributor to the Guardian’s Long Read, and also writes for Guardian Saturday magazine, Al-Jazeera English, Prospect and GQ. She has broadcast on BBC Radio 4, BBC World Service and Al-Jazeera English.
She writes deeply reported, long-form features on a range of subjects – from the Gatwick drone mystery to the Pakistani military’s promotion of travel influencers, and the rise of hoarding disorder. Her work has won multiple awards, including a One World Media award (2023) and a Foreign Press Association award (2021). In 2024 she was shortlisted as freelancer of the year at the Society of Editors’ awards.
Samira’s first book, Karachi Vice – a work of narrative non-fiction about Pakistan’s largest city – was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week on publication in 2021. In the Mail on Sunday, Razia Iqbal described it as: ‘A brilliant portrait of a complex place … the book is like a novel; each character is so beautifully drawn that we are in their heads with ease, though that is often a hard place to be.’
Samira has extensive experience as an editor, having worked at the New Statesman magazine (2008-12), then at the New Humanist, first as deputy editor, then editor-in-chief (2014-23). This editing experience informs her writing and teaching.