Samira Shackle: journalist & author

Samira Shackle: journalist & author

I’m a freelance journalist, author and editor based in London, specialising in long-form reported features. I’m a regular contributor to the Guardian Long Read, and I also write for lots of other publications.

My reporting has won multiple awards – most recently a One World Media award in 2023, and a Foreign Press Association award in 2021. I was shortlisted for freelancer of the year at the 2023 Society of Editors Awards. My first book, Karachi Vice is published by Granta in the UK and Melville House in the US. It was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.

I’m available for commissions and editing work and can be contacted at samira.shackle@gmail.com. You can also find me on Twitter @samirashackle. For regular updates on my work and original writing, sign up to my Substack newsletter.

Books

A fast-paced journey around Karachi in the company of those who know the city inside out.

‘I was completely gripped by it’
– Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire

Selected articles

  • How slavery research came under fire

    How slavery research came under fire

    This story, published by the Guardian Long Read on 1 June 2023, was commissioned as part of the Guardian’s Cotton Capital project, which examines how slavery changed Britain and the world. My piece delves into a controversy at a Cambridge college. Over the last few years, an increasing number of institutions have been commissioning investigations…

    Guardian

  • The killing of Zara Aleena

    The killing of Zara Aleena

    This feature, which appeared in the Guardian’s Saturday Magazine on 14 January 2023, tells the story of a horrific crime and its aftermath. Zara Aleena was a bright young law graduate who was brutally murdered by a stranger as she walked home from her local pub in Ilford, on the outskirts of London. It prompted…

    Guardian

  • Insulate Britain on what happened next

    Insulate Britain on what happened next

    Before Just Stop Oil was Insulate Britain – the campaigners who shut down English motorways for weeks in late 2021 to demand better insulation. For this feature, which appeared in the Guardian Saturday Magazine on 17 December 2022, I spoke to the activists involved about their decision to sit down on Britain’s busiest thoroughfares to…

    Guardian

Latest articles

Contact

I’m available for commissions and editing work and can be contacted at samira.shackle@gmail.com. You can also find me on Twitter @samirashackle or Instagram @samira.shackle