Cole Moreton: Story-teller

Cole Moreton is an award-winning journalist, who has just had his first novel, The Lightkeeper, published.  He was made Interviewer of the Year in 2016, and has written about a whole range of people and events, starting in 1993 with a little boy called Amar, who had been badly burned in Iraq.

The boy was rescued by Conservative MP, Emma Nicholson, who was monitoring the treatment of the Marsh Arabs by the regime of Saddam Hussein. Much of Cole’s early work covered trouble hotspots around the world, but he actually got into journalism in the first place to prove a careers advisor that he was wrong…

“He asked me what I wanted to be. I couldn’t say a rock star, which was the truth (David Bowie was like my freaky big brother, giving permission to be individual), so I said a writer. He said: ‘So does everybody else, it’s not going to happen, what else do you want to do?’ Working-class kids like us were not writers. We worked in a bank if we were lucky. That’s what he suggested.&n...