John Pilger
Journalist and Documentary Filmmaker · 1939–2023
Who is John Pilger?
John Richard Pilger was born on 9 October 1939 in Bondi, New South Wales, Australia, and became one of the most prominent investigative journalists and documentary filmmakers of his generation. He served as feature writer and chief foreign correspondent for the London Daily Mirror between 1962 and 1986 and directed more than fifty documentaries over his career, becoming known as a persistent critic of what he characterised as Western imperial and colonial policy. He first drew wide international attention for his reporting on the Cambodian genocide. In 2004 he wrote and presented the Granada Television documentary "Stealing a Nation," which used declassified government documents and interviews with exiled islanders to expose the British-American expulsion of the Chagossian people from the Chagos Archipelago so that Diego Garcia could become a US military base. Pilger won Britain's Journalist of the Year award in 1967 and 1979 and received the Sydney Peace Prize in 2009. He died in London on 30 December 2023 at the age of 84.
Sources: John Pilger, Wikipedia (biographical summary) · John Pilger, Stealing a Nation (Granada Television, 2004) · Al Jazeera, "John Pilger, renowned journalist and critic of 'Western imperialism', dies," 31 December 2023