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. 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.

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

06.09.2023

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Prospect

04.07.2023

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Guardian

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