1968–
British journalist and writer who tracked Angola's 1977 massacre through interviews
Her posting as BBC correspondent in Luanda from 1998, reporting on the civil war, was what set her on the later investigation of the events of 27 May 1977.
British journalist and writer born in London. She studied African politics and history at SOAS, University of London, then worked for the BBC World Service from 1996 to 2007, based in and travelling across Angola, Ivory Coast, Mali and Ghana. Reporting on Angola's civil war as BBC correspondent in Luanda from 1998 prompted her later investigation of the events of 27 May 1977. Her book In the Name of the People: Angola's Forgotten Massacre (2014) relied on interviews in London, Lisbon and Angola because almost no archival or official documents on the massacre survive; it is not an academic history but an account of her research process that makes her own political opinions and self-questioning part of the narrative. She later published the fragmentary memoir This Is the Place to Be (2016) and the novel Spent Light (2024), and has taught creative writing at Royal Holloway.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1990–1994BA and MSc in African politics with history, SOAS, University of London
- 1996–2007Journalist, mainly BBC World Service, reporting from Angola, Ivory Coast, Mali and Ghana
- 1998–2000BBC correspondent in Angola, reporting on the civil war
- 2006–2008Press Fellow, Wolfson College, Cambridge; Fellow, Wits Institute of Economic Research
- 2014Published In the Name of the People: Angola's Forgotten Massacre
Related historical events
From memoir to object-novel: the turn to experimental prose
After In the Name of the People (2014), Pawson's writing moved from reporting toward formally experimental first-person prose. This Is the Place to Be (CB editions, 2016), a fragmentary memoir about war, childhood and love, began as a sound installation conceived for the centenary commemoration of World War One; Pawson says it started life as a 20,000-word monologue, "Non Correspondence", first staged at Battersea Arts Centre in 2014, and grew to 35,000 words when she rewrote it for publication. She has described imposing a constraint on herself: not revising, but writing down each association as it came. The book was shortlisted in 2017 for the Gordon Burn Prize, the PEN Ackerley Prize and the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing. Her novel Spent Light (CB editions, 2024) explores the horrors of the modern world through the objects in a woman's life; it was a finalist for the Goldsmiths Prize 2024, a book of the year in The Guardian, TLS, Frieze and the New Statesman, and has been translated into Serbian, Dutch and Spanish. Interviewed by the New Statesman, she described a book of objects in which everything meeting the narrator's eye, from a toaster to a brass door handle, connects to a personal memory or historical event in a chain of unpredictable associations.