Christina Lamb is an award winning war correspondent and author. It was an invitation to a wedding that led Christina Lamb to leave suburban England where she grew up and move to the wilds of Pakistan’s northwest frontier. This was no ordinary wedding but that of Benazir Bhutto who went on to become Pakistan’s first female Prime Minister and was then ousted by the military amid charges of corruption.

Christina’s reports for the Financial Times charting Bhutto’s rise and fall, as well as her own travels disguised as a boy accompanying Afghan mujaheddin in their fight to oust the Soviet Union, saw her named Young Journalist of the Year in the British Press Awards. She was just 22. It was the first in a string of awards in a career that has seen her ride around Kandahar on the backs of motorbikes of the mullahs who became the Taliban; join a samba school competing in the Rio carnival with three peacocks on her head; go undercover to expose Mugabe’s rape camps in Zimbabwe; and search for lost tribes in uncharted regions of the Amazon.

Christina has been based in Pakistan, Brazil, South Africa and Portugal. She has worked for the Financial Times, spent four years as Diplomatic Correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph, and is now a senior foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times, Britain’s largest quality newspaper. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Time magazine, The Spectator and New Statesman. She has also spent a year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.

A fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, she is the author of four books. These include the bestselling The Africa House; The Sewing Circles of Herat; My Afghan Years which was the runner up in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award 2003; Waiting for Allah, and House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-torn Zimbabwe. A collection of Christina's journalism will be published summer 2007 under the title Tea With Pinochet.

Her focus has always been on the developing world with the aim of shining a spotlight on forgotten areas. Christina has reported from many areas of conflict around the world including Afghanistan, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Angola, Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia. She was the first journalist to obtain access to the interrogations of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11 and wrote a memorable dispatch in July 2006 after being ambushed by the Taliban with British troops. In 2002 she was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year in all the major British awards for her reporting on the War on Terror. She was again named Foreign Correspondent of the Year in 2006.

Her work inspired the latest book of bestselling Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho, The Zahir.

Afghanistan remains Christina’s greatest passion. She has given talks around the world from London to New Zealand about it, from schools to Women’s Institutes, even to the Parachute regiment. She led the Sunday Times most successful ever Christmas Appeal which raised more than £330,000 for two British charities in Afghanistan.

She currently has two books on the go. One is following the interweaving lives of a white farmer and his black nanny in Zimbabwe who literally change places. The other is a biography of the British plant-collector and botanical painter Margaret Mee, one of the first female explorers and campaigners for the Amazon rainforest. Next year she will be teaching a course in literary non-fiction at the Arvon Foundation.

Christina lives between London and Portugal with her husband Paulo and young son. The couple married in Zanzibar where Paulo had to tick to say whether he was monogamous, polygamous or potentially polygamous. “It could have been a very short marriage had he ticked the wrong box”, says Christina. Their six-year-old son Lourenço likes to tell people, “my mummy lives on a plane”.