About

Holly Young is an award-winning freelance journalist specialising in deeply reported features and investigations for online and radio.

She spent four years as a staff editor at the Guardian in London before going freelance. Her reporting focuses on the environment, inequality and human rights. She has written widely about these issues in the context of migration, mental health, climate change, technology, language, cities and education.

She has reported for The Guardian, Al Jazeera, BBC World Service, The Independent, PRI’s The World, and Germany’s state broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

In 2021 she worked on a six-month Guardian investigation into working conditions in the European meat industry. She has also worked on investigations with the collaborative journalism platform Lighthouse Reports as well as a cross-border investigation with Guardian/DataDista into the environmental impact of pig farming, which won a 2023 Climate Journalism Award in the Data Category.

She was awarded a reporting grant from Columbia Journalism School’s Dart Center (2019), was chosen as first recipient of Ground Truth Podcast Incubator (2018), and has received journalism fellowships from the European Journalism Center and the International Journalism Programme. In 2018 she edited the book ‘Rise’ and in 2020 her research on a Berlin refugee shelter was published in the book Structures of Protection.

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Originally from Edinburgh, Holly spent four years working for the Guardian in London as an editor, commissioner and writer. During this time she was deputy editor of the Global Development Professionals section, editor of the language section, and the launch editor of a series on psychology and learning. She has also produced film, podcasts, and interactive features for the Guardian. She focuses on long form features and investigations.

In 2015 Holly won the AidEx Humanitarian Reporting Award for her coverage of refugee mental health support in Sicily. The same year, after being awarded a fellowship from the International Journalism Programme, she worked for two months at Die Tageszeitung. In 2016 Holly was awarded a European Journalism Fellowship with the Freie Universität to document the experiences of refugees living in the city's emergency shelters.

Since becoming full-time freelance in September 2017 she has written for Guardian, Spex, Weapons for Reason, The Local, Al Jazeera, IRIN, Info Migrants and Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle. 

In April 2018 Holly was the first person selected for the incubator project at Ground Truth in Boston. Her audio documentary on interpreters in the asylum system can be found here on the award-winning podcast series. She has also produced radio reports for the BBC World Service, PRI’s ‘The World’ , and Deutsche Welle’s ‘Worldlink’ and Living Planet.

Holly is the editor of ‘Rise’, a book published in 2018 by photographer Alexa Vachon exploring the lives of a football team for refugee women in Germany.

In September 2019 she was chosen to attend the highly competitive conference with the Dart Center at Columbia University’s Journalism School in New York. In October 2019 she was awarded a reporting fellowship from the school.

After studying Modern History at Oxford University, Holly completed a masters in Contemporary South Asian Studies, also at Oxford University. She received a first-class distinction and was awarded the annual Barbara Harriss-White Award for her research on Dharavi slum in Mumbai.

Holly is always looking for story tips, commissions and exciting collaborative projects. Get in touch on hollyyoung.journalist@gmail.com