Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is an award-winning journalist who has written for the The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Evening Standard, and The Mail among others and was a weekly columnist on The Independent for eighteen years. She is now a weekly columnist for I news and was shortlisted in this year’s Society of Editor’s columnist of the year award. She was the first regular columnist of colour on a national newspaper in the UK and the first female Muslim. She campaigns against forced marriages, female genital mutilation and for the rights of women and girls around the world. She has authored several books. The most recent one is Ladies Who Punch – fifty stories of incredibly women, past and present. In 2001 she was awarded an MBE for services to journalism, a medal she returned two years later, as a protest against the war in Iraq. Yasmin won The Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2002.