Rana Ayyub is an Indian investigative journalist and a global opinions writer at the Washington Post. She has worked as a reporter, editor, and columnist with some of the leading publications in India and internationally. Her pieces appear in the Time, New York Times, Guardian, Atlantic, and Foreign Policy and she has been profiled for the cover of the New Yorker. Rana has reported extensively on majoritarian politics and violence, extrajudicial killings by the state, Islamophobia, communalism and authored an international bestseller entitled Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover-Up.

Rana’s work is focused on the marginalized and the oppressed. She advocates and reports about the fight against misinformation and the protection of democratic ideas. It is for this work that she has faced extreme forms of persecution by the Indian government which includes multiple cases for which she is facing trial in India.

In a career spanning fifteen years, Rana has been awarded the Sanskriti award for integrity and excellence in journalism by the former President of India. She was the recipient of the Global Shining Light award for Investigative journalism in 2017 and the Most Resilient Global Journalist of 2018 at the Peace Palace in Hague. In 2019, she was named among ten global journalists who faced maximum threats to their lives across the world. In 2018, the United Nations allotted six special rapporteurs to the Indian government to protect her safety, a first for an individual case in India.

In 2020, she was announced as the recipient of the McMgill medal for journalistic courage. In 2021, she was given the award for Excellence in Journalism and International Human Rights by Texas Tech University.

In 2022, she was awarded the Overseas Press Club Award for her incisive commentary on India and the same year she was awarded the John Aubuchon press freedom honor, the highest journalism award by the Press Club in the United States. Rana has been named among the ten journalists in the world who face maximum threats to their lives. She lives in Mumbai with her family.

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