Melanie McFadyean

McFadyean holds BA (first-class) and MA degrees in English from Leeds University, and after leaving university taught art and then English in Hackney, London.[2] She served as agony aunt for Just Seventeen magazine on its launch in 1983.[3]

Following time spent in Northern Ireland, she co-wrote the 1984 book Only The Rivers Run Free: Northern Ireland the Women's War, described by The Women's Review of Books as "passionate, compelling and absolutely necessary".[4] She also co-wrote Thatcher's Reign: A Bad Case of the Blues (1984), then published a collection of short stories entitled Hotel Romantika (1986, in the Virago Press Upstarts imprint for teenagers).

As a journalist, McFadyean worked at The Guardian, and has gone on to freelance in radio and television as well as print, writing for such newspapers and journals as The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, London Review of Books, Granta, The Independent, and The Oldie. The focus of much of her journalism has been refugees and asylum seekers,[5] and she has spoken of being initially inspired by her own family story: "My mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany. She escaped but she had an aunt and an uncle who didn't, so I grew up with it, knowledge of refugees. But the thing that got me in to it was someone rang me up and asked if I had heard this story about children disappearing? ... I have worked as a teacher, as an agony aunt and always had an affiliation with children, and the idea that children were going missing…"[6]

She was consultant producer on the documentary film Guilty by Association, broadcast on BBC One on 7 July 2014,[7] and on a Channel 4 documentary, The Lost Boy, about missing child Ben Needham, and her radio work encompasses a six-part BBC Radio 4 series about couples who had been together for three decades (Thirty Years and More) and a programme about controversial child diarist Opal Whiteley.[8][9]

For 14 years from 2001 she was a lecturer in investigative journalism at City University's Journalism department.[1] She went on to study for an MA in Conflict Resolution in Divided Societies at King's College London.[1]

In 2001 McFadyean won a media award from Amnesty International (for a piece about unaccompanied asylum-seeking children that was published in Guardian Weekend) and has since served on their panel of judges.[6][10][1]

Her work as part of an investigation into the law of "joint enterprise" resulted in a report for The Bureau of Investigative Journalism that won the Bar Council Legal Reporting Award 2014.[1][11][12][13]

McFadyean is married to Malcolm Blair.[14] Her mother, Marion Guttman, was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who came to England in 1937, and McFadyean's father, international lawyer Colin McFadyean, was a Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve in World War II who was later recruited by Ian Fleming to Naval Intelligence;[15] her parents were married from 1940 until 1960, and he subsequently married Mary Malcolm.[6][16][17][18] Mcfadyean has written about the struggles faced by her father in later life to cope with her stepmother's dementia.[19] McFadyean has written in The Guardian of her own experience of breast cancer.[20][21]

• Melanie McFadyean profile at The Guardian.
• Melanie McFadyean at The Independent.