Gary Younge is a New York based columnist for the Guardian and the Nation who was last year granted the UK James Cameron award for the “moral vision and integrity” of his coverage of the 2008 presidential elections. He is also a regular broadcaster on the BBC, having made several documentaries for both television and radio. Most recently he presented a two part documentary for the World Service entitled Opposing Obama exploring the roots of opposition to Obama and a 100 Years After Jack Johnson: Boxing and Black Male Identity for Radio 4. He has written three books, No Place Like Home: A Black Briton’s Journey Through the Deep South, Stranger in a Strange Land, Encounters in the Disunited States and Who Are We: and should it matter in the 21st century?, an examination of the politics of identity.

Since Gary joined the Guardian in 1994 he has won several other awards for his reporting of race in Britain and has covered Southern Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. A keen commentator on issues of social justice, inequality and movement politics, he was posted to New York as the correspondent for the Guardian in 2003. Since 2006 he was been the Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Nation Institute and a columnist at the Nation and in 2009 he started a two year visiting professorship at Brooklyn College CUNY. In 2007 he was awarded two Honorary Doctorates at British universities. Raised in England by his Barbadian mother, Younge graduated High School and then taught English to refugees in Sudan before returning to Edinburgh to study French and Russian at Heriot Watt University.