Martin Sixsmith - Career and The Writings

Career and The Writings

Sixsmith joined the BBC in 1980 where he worked as a foreign correspondent, most notably reporting from Moscow during the end of the Cold War. He also reported from Poland during the Solidarity uprising and was the BBC’s Washington correspondent during the election and first presidency of Bill Clinton.

Sixsmith left the BBC in 1997 to work for the newly elected government of Tony Blair. He became Director of Communications (a civil service post), working first with Harriet Harman, and Frank Field, then with Alistair Darling. His next position was as a Director of GEC plc, where he oversaw the rebranding of the company as Marconi plc.

In December 2001, he returned to the Civil Service to join the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions as Director of Communications in time to become embroiled in the second act of the scandal over Jo Moore. Moore was special adviser to the transport secretary Stephen Byers and had been the subject of much public condemnation for suggesting that a controversial announcement should be "buried" during the media coverage of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Sixsmith was widely expected to write a memoir or autobiography in the wake of his civil service departure, but was gagged by the government. Instead, he produced a novel about near-future politics called Spin which was published in 2004.

His second novel, I Heard Lenin Laugh, was published in 2005. In 2006 he was commissioned by BBC Radio 4 to present a series of programmes on Russian poetry, literature and art.

In 2007 he published The Litvinenko File, an examination of the feud between the Kremlin and Russia’s émigré oligarchs.

In February 2008 Sixsmith worked on two BBC documentaries exploring the legacy of the KGB in today’s Russia and also presented a BBC radio programme, The Snowy Streets of St. Petersburg, about artists and writers who fled the former Eastern bloc.

In 2009 he published The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, a non-fiction book about the forcible separation of a mother and child by the nuns of an Irish convent during the 1950s, and their subsequent attempts to contact one another. A film of the book is currently in production with the London based Baby Cow Pictures.

In February 2010 he published Putin’s Oil, about Russia’s energy wars and their consequences for Moscow and the world.

He works as an advisor to the BBC political sitcom The Thick of It, and the Oscar nominated film, In the Loop. In 2011, he presented Russia: The Wild East, a 50-part history of Russia for BBC Radio 4, the last episode of which was broadcast on 12 August.

Martin Sixsmith currently resides in London. He is a Liverpool F.C fan and attended the Rome, Brussels, Istanbul and Athens finals of the European Champions League/ European Cup.