Richard Beeston Bursary

RICHARD BEESTON
BURSARY 2024
Offered in association with The Times Newspaper


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This award of £6,000 is for an aspiring British or UK-based foreign correspondent to spend six weeks abroad, researching and reporting on a foreign news story, in association with The Times newspaper. Applicants should have at least two years journalistic experience and be under the age of thirty on the application closing date.

How to Apply

Applications should be submitted to
richardbeestonbursary@gmail.com by
9.00am on May 20th 2024 and should include:

  • A detailed outline of the proposed destination of travel and the broad nature of the story which you are intending to report on.
  • A brief CV.
  • Samples of published journalism.
  • A journalistic referee.
  • A scan of your passport.

The Judges reserve the right to request further information at a later stage of the application process.


As well as sponsoring the Richard Beeston Bursary, the RBB is additionally sponsoring a student on the International Journalism MA at City, University of London. For more details of the application process for both that course and the bursary attached to it visit the City, University Of London website.

Donors

  • Dick & Hazel Beeston
  • Fiona Beeston & Jean-Jacques Guilbaud
  • Jennifer & Julian Browne
  • Kate & Robin Browne
  • Simon Bryan
  • Sarah & Patrick Campbell-Jones
  • Catherine Eccles
  • Marianne & Fred Emery
  • Rosie & Peter Joy
  • Cathra & Adam Kelliher
  • Amy Kellogg
  • Stephen Lambert & Jenni Russell
  • Gerard & Katrin Legrain
  • Kate & Charles Llewellyn
  • Jonathan Miller
  • Elisabeth Murdoch
  • News UK
  • Amy & Alex Richards
  • Linda Shaughnessy

Judges

  • Natasha Fairweather
  • Suzy Jagger
  • Anthony Loyd
  • Ben Macintyre
  • Mike Smith

Advisory Committee

  • Nomi Bar-Yaacov
  • James Harding
  • David Horovitz
  • Roula Khalaf
  • Sam Kiley
  • Jenni Russell
  • Jon Snow
richard beeston journalist bursary

Richard Beeston, the distinguished and much-loved foreign editor of The Times, died of cancer in 2013 soon after his 50th birthday. After a short stint as an apprentice reporter on Johannesburg's Financial Mail and the Coventry Evening Telegraph, Richard moved to Beirut at the height of the civil war in 1984, aged just 21, to work for The Daily Star. Thus began a life-long fascination with Lebanon, and the Middle East in general. Forced back to London by the spate of kidnappings of foreign journalists, Richard joined The Times in 1986 and was to work for the paper for the rest of his life. As the fireman on the foreign desk, Richard carried his passport - bristling with visas for warzones - with him at all times. He was one of the first reporters into Halabja, in Kurdistan, in 1988 after Saddam's gas attack and he covered wars, invasions, revolutions, natural and man-made disasters - and the odd good news story - in the 27 years which followed. He was posted to Jerusalem as The Times's Middle East

richard-beeston-journalist-busary

Correspondent in 1991, and became the Moscow Bureau Chief in 1994 during the Chechen War. His return to London shortly preceded 9/11 and a decade of reporting from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was to follow. Richard was made Foreign Editor of The Times in 2008, shortly after being diagnosed with cancer. He travelled to Afghanistan, Israel and Italy in the months running up to his death.

The bursaries being set up in his name are designed to address Richard's passionate belief that good journalists are not forged in the newsroom, but in the field. He loved to mentor aspiring young foreign correspondents and to give them the opportunity to develop their reporting and writing skills by working on a fast-breaking news story.

The RB bursaries now also honour the name and memory of Richard “Dick” Beeston senior, a life-long foreign correspondent and Richard's father, who died on February 19th 2015.

Past Winners Of The Richard Beeston Bursaries

Delara Shakib

Delara Shakib

Delara Shakib was the co-winner of the 2023 outward-bound Richard Beeston Bursary. She started her career at Channel 4 News, receiving a Peabody award for the Cambridge Analytica investigation. Subsequently she worked for NBC's foreign unit and went freelance in 2021, covering the Russia-Ukraine war from Poland and Hungary for Channel 4 News and working on documentaries for VICE News.

Delara pitched to go to the Caucasus to report on Azerbaijan's blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh. Weeks before the bursary began, Azerbaijan launched a full-scale military offensive on the Armenian enclave. An exodus of more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians followed. Based in the mountain town of Goris, Delara reported on the blockade and the civilian population fleeing in daily dispatches for The Times & The Sunday Times. Delara is currently based in the UK and continues to write exclusively for The Times & The Sunday Times.


Rory Sullivan

Rory Sullivan

Rory Sullivan was the co-winner of the 2023 outward-bound Richard Beeston Bursary. After starting his career in London at CNN and The Independent, he moved to Central America to become a freelance foreign correspondent. His writing on the region has been published by The Times, The Economist, The FT Weekend Magazine, The Guardian, Private Eye and BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent.

As a recipient of the Beeston Bursary, Rory first covered the August 2023 Guatemalan presidential elections. However, he spent the bulk of the six-week fellowship investigating the mano dura policies of El Salvador's populist president Nayib Bukele.

Rory is now based in Guatemala City, where he mainly focuses on long-form journalism. He also reviews books and writes travel features.


Alice de Souza

Alice de Souza

Alice de Souza is the first student that the Richard Beeston Bursary sponsored on the International Journalism MA at City, University of London. She is a Brazilian journalist and a specialist in human rights reporting. She is a researcher at The Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji), a regional coordinator at The Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) and a freelance reporter whose work has appeared at Agência Pública, El Estornudo, The Intercept Brasil, UOL, El Universal, Open Democracy and other media outlets. A former reporter at Diario de Pernambuco and editorial coordinator at Jornal do Commercio, she is the recipient of numerous awards including One World Media, Sigma Awards and Vladimir Herzog de Anistia e Direitos Humanos. Alice is also a Cosecha Roja, Climate Tracker and International Women's Media Foundation (IWMF) fellow, and a member of the 3rd Generation of the Latin American Network of Young Journalists Distintas Latitudes. She was the most-awarded journalist in Northeast Brazil in 2018, 2019, and 2022.

Alice said of City's MA in International Journalism: "It has been a great experience, giving me the practical skills and theoretical knowledge to cover global crises and humanitarian issues. This opportunity is especially valuable because it has allowed me to report on Brazil and Latin America for the outside world, examining the impact of the climate crisis and the destruction of biomes on traditional communities' health and quality of life, as well as to dream of a career as a foreign correspondent or investigative reporter for a major international news organisation."


Fred Harter

Fred Harter

Fred Harter was the winner of the 2019 outward-bound Richard Beeston Bursary. He is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, Tortoise, The New Humanitarian, NPR, The Africa Report and Voice of America. He started out as a journalist on the Britain section of The Economist, where he wrote about politics, social affairs and the odder corners of the British Isles.

Fred moved to Addis Ababa in the spring of 2021 on the Richard Beeston Bursary and continues to cover the conflict in northern Ethiopia. He has also reported from Somalia, Somaliland, Kenya, Gabon, Niger and Kosovo.


Mohammed Moussa

Mohammed Moussa

Mohammed Moussa was the winner of the 2019 incoming Richard Beeston Bursary. He is a 26-year-old Palestinian journalist living and working in Gaza. In 2015 he graduated with a BA in English Literature from Al-Azhar University of Gaza. His career in journalism started in 2014, during the Gaza war, when he began to report for numerous local and international websites. Working in journalism, under tough conditions and with the urgency of daily attacks, improved the clarity of his writing and allowed Mohammed to find his own voice as well as giving voice to others. He strongly believes in the power of storytelling: the power of a story to inspire and challenge, to teach and to change. He is also a poet, and the founder of the first spoken-word community in Gaza: "The Gaza Poet's Society" .

Because of the Covid pandemic, Mohammed was only able to take up his place as the 2019 incoming Richard Beeston Bursary winner in the autumn of 2022. He spent six weeks in London working on The Times foreign desk, editing and reporting, and experiencing the challenges of publishing a physical and digital daily paper. He is currently based in Istanbul.


Layli Foroudi

Layli Foroudi

Layli Foroudi was the winner of the 2018 outward-bound Richard Beeston Bursary. After graduating from University College London with a first class degree in French and Russian, Layli moved to Moscow and worked on The Moscow Times. In 2016, she completed a Master's degree in Race, Ethnicity and Conflict at Trinity College Dublin. During her studies, and since graduating, she has written on topics spanning migration, gender, culture and tech, for publications which include the Financial Times, the Irish Times, CNN and Index on Censorship. Most recently she has been freelancing for Al Jazeera English's media analysis show The Listening Post.

Layli based herself in Tunis while on the Richard Beeston Bursary in the spring of 2019 and spent three years covering North Africa from there. She is currently working in Paris as a correspondent for Reuters.


Mohamed Ezz

Mohamed Ezz

Mohamed Ezz was the winner of the 2018 incoming Richard Beeston Bursary. An Egyptian journalist born in the Delta city of Mansoura, Mohamed's passion for journalism burgeoned when the Arab Spring broke out in Egypt. Though still a student at the time, he co-founded the Egypt Report website, exploring how the revolution was changing the lives of people in the Delta. After graduating, he moved to Cairo and embarked on a professional career as a journalist and political analyst. Fluent in Arabic and English, he has spent the past six years covering Egypt and much of the Middle East for several international media outlets, including The Times, The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, The Telegraph, VICE, and The Christian Science Monitor.

As the recipient of the bursary, Mohamed spent six weeks in London during the spring of 2019 working on The Times foreign desk, editing and reporting, and experiencing the challenges of publishing a physical paper daily while remaining part of the 24 hour news cycle.


Oscar Lopez

Oscar Lopez

Oscar Lopez was the 2017 recipient of the outward-bound Richard Beeston Bursary. Originally from Mexico himself, Oscar had previously spent two years reporting from nearly every continent while completing a part-time Masters in writing at Oxford University. Under the bursary, Oscar spent 6 weeks in Mexico in the summer of 2018 reporting on the country's presidential elections, which saw leftist firebrand Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador win an historic landslide victory. Oscar now works as a freelance journalist based in Mexico. Most recently, he spent two years reporting for the New York Times in the Mexico City Bureau. Prior to joining the Times, Oscar was Americas Correspondent for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, where he covered LGBT+ rights in the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean. As a freelancer, Oscar has reported in more than a dozen countries for the likes of TIME, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post and many more. In 2020, Oscar was named Journalist of the Year by the NLGJA, the U.S. association of LGBT+ journalists.


Shira Rubin

Shira Rubin

Shira Rubin was the 2017 Incoming Richard Beeston Bursary winner. A journalist. living and working in Tel Aviv, Shira was born in the U.S. and returned to Israel in 2010. When the outbreak of the Arab Spring complicated her plans to study Arabic in Syria, Shira remained in Israel, where she began reporting. In 2015, she received an MA degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and published thesis research on Syrian refugee single mothers living in Jordan. Shira has won several awards for her coverage of Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and the region that has been featured in the Atlantic, USA Today, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, Slate, the Los Angeles Times and others. While working on The Times foreign desk for 6 weeks in the spring of 2018, Shira contributed several news stories. Shira Rubin is currently a journalist for The Washington Post based in Tel Aviv, covering news from Israel, the Palestinian territories and the region. Before joining The Post, Rubin worked as a freelance foreign correspondent from Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, France, Germany and Britain.


Lucinda Elliott

Lucinda Elliott

Elliott was the recipient of the 2016 Outward-Bound Richard Beeston Bursary. While on The Times bursary in the spring of 2017 Lucinda spent six weeks in Venezuela reporting on the political and social upheaval that resulted from hyperinflation, acute recession, and the deeply unpopular government of Nicolas Maduro. She had 9 pieces published in the paper during her time on the bursary and went on to write for The Times for nearly five years as a freelancer based in Venezuela and Brazil, chasing down some of the region's more colorful political characters and securing interviews with several former and current Presidents.

Lucinda later became a regional correspondent for the Financial Times (from 2021-2023) and is currently the full-time Southern Cone correspondent at Reuters based in Montevideo, Uruguay. She covers general news, finance and politics across six Latin American countries for the agency.


Linah Alsaafin

Linah Alsaafin

Linah Alsaafin was the 2016 Incoming Richard Beeston Bursary winner. A Palestinian journalist, she was born in the U.K. in 1990, and returned to Ramallah with her family when she was 13 years old as the second Intifada drew to a close. Her first piece of journalism was published when she was still an undergraduate studying for a degree in English at Bir Zeit University on the West Bank. She went on to become the youngest editor of a Palestinian local news website. After obtaining a Master's degree in Middle Eastern politics from SOAS in 2014, Linah worked at the London-based Middle East Eye website for a year and a half before returning to the West Bank to work as a freelance reporter for The Arab Weekly. While working on The Times foreign desk for 6 weeks during the spring of 2017, Linah wrote several news stories and she subsequently has also contributed to the TLS. She is currently working as a producer at Al Jazeera in Qatar.


Samira Shackle

Samira Shackle

Samira Shackle was the 2015 recipient of the outward-bound Richard Beeston Bursary. In the spring of 2016, Samira travelled to Pakistan on the RBB to explore the rise of ISIS in South Asia, with a particular focus on the role of women. She also covered a range of other stories, including Chinese investment in Balochistan and a major terror attack in Lahore. Samira went on to write a prize-winning book - Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Contested City.

Samira is the editor of the New Humanist magazine and a regular contributor to the Guardian's Long Read and Opinion sections. She writes frequently for Al-Jazeera, Prospect and Deutsche Welle. Her work has also appeared in a broad range of other publications, including the Times, the Independent, Vice, Monocle and Guernica.


Elhanan Miller

Elhanan Miller

The recipient of the 2015 incoming Richard Beeston Bursary was Jerusalem-born Elhanan Miller.

Fluent in English, Hebrew, Arabic and French, Elhanan began his career as a linguist and translator, before becoming a journalist and working as the Arab Affairs correspondent at The Times of Israel. Elhanan's opinion pieces have also been published in The Wall Street Journal, Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post and he regularly appears as a commentator on Israeli politics for Al-Jazeera, BBC, CTV News Canada and Sky News Arabia. He has participated in interreligious dialogue groups with Palestinians in Jerusalem and interned with Knesset Member Colette Avital (Labour) as a Legacy Heritage fellow. In 2012 he completed research on the political aspects of the Palestinian refugee issue as an Atkin Fellow at Kings College, London.

During his time on The Times foreign desk in early 2016, Elhanan was able to put his language skills to work by travelling to Calais to interview young people in the Jungle Refugee camp.

Elhanan became a rabbi in 2019 and is currently based in Jerusalem. Formerly the Arab Affairs reporter for the Times of Israel and community rabbi in Canberra, Australia, he is the founding editor of People of the Book, an online initiative geared at educating Arab audiences about Jewish faith and culture.

Ayman Oghanna

Ayman Oghanna

The 2014 recipient of the outward-bound Richard Beeston Bursary was London-born Ayman Oghanna. Half-British, half-Iraqi, Ayman is a multi-media journalist who specialises in the Middle East. After earning an M.A. in International Relations and Middle East Studies from the University of St Andrews, he studied journalism at Columbia University in New York. Since beginning work as a journalist in 2009 Ayman's stories, photographs and videos have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, Newsweek, National Geographic, VICE and Al Jazeera America. While on the RB Bursary in the spring of 2015, he reported from Baghdad and Ramadi.

Ayman is a freelance writer, photographer and broadcaster who specialises in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, conflict and migration. He is now based in Greece. He is a founding member of the Frontline Freelance Register, dedicated to protecting and uniting freelance journalists reporting in foreign countries and conflict zones.


Abeer Ayyoub

Abeer Ayyoub

The 2014 winner of the incoming Richard Beeston Bursary was Abeer Ayyoub from Gaza City. Having received a BA in English literature from The Islamic University of Gaza in 2010, she went on to do a master's degree in New Media. Abeer began her career as a human rights consultant at Human Rights Watch, and as a journalist, based in Gaza, for Haaretz newspaper, Al-Monitor and freelancing for other international media outlets including The Guardian and The Mirror.

Since completing her bursary at The Times in the spring of 2015, Abeer has moved to Istanbul where she lives with her husband and child. She works as a contributor to Middle East Eye and makes a podcast in Arabic - A Mother's Journey - about her life as a mother in the diaspora.