Tim Marshall

Tim Marshall was Diplomatic Editor and foreign correspondent for Sky News. After thirty years’ experience in news reporting and presenting, he left full-time news journalism to concentrate on writing and analysis. His books explore why nation states exist, the nature of borders and how the physical, cultural, and political characteristics have come to define the world.

After three years as IRN’s Paris correspondent and extensive work for BBC radio and TV, Tim joined Sky News. Reporting from Europe, the USA and Asia, he became the Middle East Correspondent based in Jerusalem. Tim also reported in the field from Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia during the Balkan wars. He spent most of the Kosovo crisis in Belgrade, where he was one of the few western journalists who stayed on to report from one of the main targets of NATO bombing raids. Tim was in Kosovo to greet the NATO troops on the day they advanced into Pristina. He has also covered the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, and has written for many national newspapers including the Times, The Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, and The Sunday Times.

Tim’s first book, Shadowplay: The Overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic, was a bestseller in former Yugoslavia and continues to be one of the most highly regarded accounts of that period. Dirty Northern B*st*rds! and Other Tales from the Terraces: The Story of Britain’s Football Chants was a widely acclaimed look at a very different type of conflict.  His third book, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics, became an international success. It looks at why, whoever the leader or whatever their goals, ultimately geography dominates their choices.

The follow-up Prisoners of Geography explores ten regions set to influence a new age of geopolitics, from Australia to the UK, Saudi Arabia to Ethiopia and why fundamental shifts in resources, economics and politics in these regions will set the tone for decades to come. In The Future of Geography: How Power and Politics in Space Will Change Our World, Tim covers great-power rivalry; technology; commerce; combat in space; and what it means for all of us down here on Earth.

Tim has been shot with bird pellets in Cairo, hit over the head with a plank of wood in London, bruised by the police in Tehran, arrested by Serbian intelligence, detained in Damascus, declared persona non grata in Croatia, bombed by the RAF in Belgrade and tear-gassed all over the world. However, he says none of this compares with the experience of going to see his beloved Leeds United away at Millwall FC in London.