Daniel Trilling is a widely published journalist, author and editor based in London.
He is a regular contributor to the Guardian’s Long Read and the London Review of Books, and has written for a range of publications including the New York Times, Financial Times and Al-Jazeera English.
He specialises in long-form reported journalism on human rights and politics, particularly migration and identity. His profile of the UK’s Home Office was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2022, and his contribution to the reported essay collection Broke: Fixing Britain’s Poverty Crisis was shortlisted for the Orwell in 2023. His 2018 book, Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe, was based on five years of reporting from multiple countries and told the story of Europe’s refugee crisis from the perspective of the people at its sharp end. His first book, Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain’s Far Right (2012), investigated the revival of fascist politics in the 21st century.
He learned many of his most important writing skills by editing other people’s work – first, as an assistant editor at the New Statesman; then as editor-in-chief of New Humanist. Today, he works on various teaching and mentoring projects, including as an associate lecturer in journalism at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, where he helps run the Refugee Journalism Project, a course for exiled media workers in the UK. Currently, Daniel is thinking about the limits of journalistic storytelling, as well as its strengths. To that end, Granta magazine published “A Place that Belongs to Us”, an essay in fragments, in 2022.