Charlotte Eagar

Charlotte Eagar is Contributing Editor on Newsweek, an award-winning film-maker and foreign correspondent, magazine journalist, novelist and co-founder of the Syrian Trojan Women Project, a drama therapy and strategic communications project for Syrian refugees.

In November 2014, she co-produced 'We Are All Refugees, a 6-part Arabic audio drama soap pilot about Syrian refugees in Jordan, in conjunction with the UNHCR and Souriali Radio. It is being broadcast on Souriali Radio and the UNHCR website. In December 2013 in Jordan, she co-produced Syria: The Trojan Women, an Arabic production of Euripides' great anti-war tragedy with an all-female amateur cast of Syrian refugees, supported by Oxfam and directed by the Syrian director Omar Abusaada.

Charlotte Eagar is an executive producer on Queens of Syria, a documentary about the original Syria Trojan Women production, directed by Yasmin Fedda, which won Best Director in the Arab World at its premiere at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival in November 2014, produced by Georgina Paget of Refuge Productions.

She is currently working with her husband William Stirling – her co-writer and co-producer on the Syria Trojan Women projects – on a feature film version of the Trojan Women, directed by DR Hood (Wreckers, 2013) and produced by Georgina Paget of Refuge Productions, due to be shot on location in Jordan in May 2015, as well as several Syrian refugee drama therapy projects. In April 2013 Charlotte and her husband worked on their first drama therapy project in Dandora, Nairobi, co-writing and co-directing the eight-part mini soap Nothing's Gonna Change for Me, with an amateur cast of Nairobi slum kids, commissioned by M&S through the NGO Emerging Leaders.

Charlotte Eagar's first film, a short romantic comedy, Scooterman, co-written and co-produced with William Stirling, directed and co-produced by Kirsten Cavendish, won audience-rated Best of the Fest at Palm Springs and the LA Comedy Festival (2010), and opened the Santa Barbara Film Festival in 2011. A feature-length version is currently in development, as are several feature-length scripts and a TV series.

Charlotte Eagar has been a journalist for over 25 years, since covering the Romanian revolution as a freelancer for the Scotsman, whilst still at university. She has worked for a variety of newspapers and magazines, including The Sunday Times Magazine, The Observer, the Sunday Telegraph, the Spectator, the Evening Standard Magazine, The Mail on Sunday and Tatler, and has written stories from such diverse places as Sarajevo, Moscow, Baghdad, Kabul, Korea and Rome. As well as a career as a foreign correspondent, she was Deputy Features Editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Assistant Features Editor of the Mail on Sunday, Senior Editor of Tatler (twice) and was a contract writer with the Evening Standard magazine for some years. She was a co-founder of Reportage Press, a publishing house specialising in books on foreign affairs, but left the company in 2008. She was also co-founder and a trustee of Schools4Schools, a charity which helped support the reconstruction of several schools in Pakistan after the 2005 earthquake.

Her novel, The Girl in the Film (2008), is a love story set during the siege of Sarajevo, which she covered for the Observer. It has been re-published by Centrum Books in Sarajevo and as an e-book with Endeavour Press. She was runner up in the British Press Awards Foreign Stringer of the Year in 1993 and Cosmopolitan Women of the Year 1994 for her coverage of Bosnia as the Observer's Balkans Correspondent during the early 90's Bosnian war.

In 2010 she married the film-maker and writer William Stirling whom she had first met on an Ancient Greek course in 1983. She read classics at Oxford and History at Edinburgh.