Life and Career
After school, Hawksley joined the Merchant Navy, and sailed across the world. He joined the BBC in the early 1980s.
In 1986, Hawksley was expelled from Sri Lanka where he had reported on a number of government atrocities in its conflict with Tamil separatists. In 1987 he covered violence in the Philippines and received death threats. In 1989 after the killings in Tiananmen Square he went to Hong Kong and reported on social stresses due to the country’s imminent transfer to Chinese rule. He was simultaneously a reporter for the whole of Asia. He later covered this transfer live in Beijing. In 1994, he opened the BBC’s first television bureau in China. Humphrey Hawksley reported on fighting in The Balkans, Iraq and Timor Humphrey Hawksley has also reported on slavery in cocoa production.
Hawksley has written extensively in Newspapers including The Guardian and The Times.
Hawksley is also the author of best-selling political novels aimed at raising key strategic issues in the far east before a broader audience. These include Dragon Fire, Ceremony of Innocence, Absolute Measures, Red Spirit and co-author with Simon Holberton of Dragon Strike. His latest books are The Third World War, The History Book and "Democracy Kills: What's So Good About Having the Vote?".
The History Book was re-released as Security Breach on 28 July 2008. On his blog, Humphrey Hawksley explains the renaming thus:
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Famous quotes containing the words life and/or career:
“The life of a good man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringement as in the observance, and our lives are sustained by a nearly equal expense of virtue of some kind. The decaying tree, while yet it lives, demands sun, wind, and rain no less than the green one. It secretes sap and performs the functions of health. If we choose, we may study the alburnum only. The gnarled stump has as tender a bud as the sapling.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes happens to the women who pursue it is the best argument imaginable for teaching girls that they should always be able to take care of themselves.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)