FEATURE
GETTING TO KNOW
THE FELLOWS
Chosen from a competitive pool of candidates, Hillary Leung and Amy Sood have been named the 2021-2022 Clare Hollingworth Fellows. Ed Peters shares their stories.
S MEMBER VOICES The Clare Hollingworth Fellowship supports Hong Kong-based journalists and journalism students.
omewhere in the dustier files of the British security services lies a report from early March 1939 on the activities of a fresh-faced 27-year-old who had graduated in Slavonic and Eastern European studies at University College London. Clare Hollingworth – for it was she – was running the affairs of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia in Katowice, western Poland, succouring Jews and other victims of the Nazi annexation of their native country. Something about her behaviour ruffled feathers at MI5, and Hollingworth – who by June had sped several thousand refugees to safety – was eased out of the agency. Gravitating to Warsaw, she drifted into
journalism, and the rest, as they say, is history. Rather than “Second World War Starting Soonish” the Daily Telegraph headlined her bravura 29 August scoop “1,000 Tanks Massed on Polish Border.” She’d been taken on as a stringer three days earlier. Hollingworth subsequently became the doyenne of foreign correspondents, and was a club member for more than 40 years. She died in 2017, aged 105. The FCC awards the Fellowship that bears her name annually to two early-career journalists or journalism school students in Hong Kong. The FCC’s 2021-2022 Fellows, Hillary Leung and Amy Sood, introduce themselves here.
Fellows enjoy: • Complimentary access to the FCC’s talks and conferences. • Unlimited use of FCC facilities. • A fee waiver for the term of their fellowship. • Networking opportunities with senior newsroom leaders. The fellowship runs from 1 September 2021 to 31 August 2022.
PHOTO: SUPPLIED
Learn more: fcchk.org/ clarehollingworth
Covering the 2019 protests in Hong Kong propelled rookie reporter Hillary Leung up a steep – and exhilarating – learning curve.
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THE CORRESPONDENT
21/9/2021 7:18 PM