Andrew Harding is a BBC foreign correspondent and author.

He has been living and working abroad for the past 35 years in the former Soviet Union, Asia, Africa, and currently in France.

Andrew is the author of three acclaimed non-fiction books, The Mayor of Mogadishu, These Are Not Gentle People, and A Small Stubborn Town.

His work has won him significant acclaim, including two Emmy awards, two Prix Bayeux awards for war reporting, South Africa’s top literary prize, a share of a US Peabody award, and many other prizes. He was recently a finalist for Britain’s Royal Television Society’s journalist of the year.

Andrew began his career in the former Soviet Union, living in Moscow and Tbilisi between 1991 and 2000. He then moved to Nairobi, Singapore, Bangkok, and spent 14 years reporting on Africa from Johannesburg before moving to Paris.

Over the course of his career Andrew has reported on forty armed conflicts and many other significant events including the Asian tsunami and west Africa’s Ebola outbreak. He has spent many months reporting from the frontlines of Ukraine’s current war.

In March 2022 Andrew reported on the aftermath of a small but decisive battle in southern Ukraine, which led him to write his latest book, A Small, Stubborn Town.

Early in 2016, Andrew began investigating a double-murder in South Africa. His book, These Are Not Gentle People, won the Sunday Times Alan Paton award. A BBC Radio 4 series, Blood Lands, won Europe’s top radio prize, the Prix Europa.

Andrew has been visiting Somalia since 2000 and was in Mogadishu during the height of the battle against the Islamist militants of Al Shabab and during repeated famines. He is one of the very few foreign journalists to have travelled into territory controlled by Al Shabab and met their commanders, or to have visited (twice) the pirate town of Eyl. His experiences led him to write the internationally-acclaimed non-fiction book, The Mayor of Mogadishu.