“[Patrick Cockburn] brought the existence of the Islamic State to the world’s attention. A formidable piece of reporting drawing on his front line experience, it was written with style and expert analysis.”

To view the rest of the winners, visit the official website of The Press Awards

I would like to think it will help to fill a large gap in people’s knowledge of what is happening in Iraq and Syria and the Middle East as a whole. It is not that newspaper, radio and television reporting of crises in the Middle East are necessarily wrong, but that the quality and quantity of the information conveyed is limited by the very urgency and brevity of daily reporting. This simply cannot explain something as complex as the reasons behind the rise of Islamic State. The only way this can be done is by means of well-informed and up-to-date books. Reading them is not just the best way of understanding what is happening; it is the only way of doing so. Schools, universities and even publishers don’t make this point strongly enough.

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Patrick Cockburn of The Independent won the foreign affairs prize for his coverage of the emergence of ISIS.

The judges said: “Patrick Cockburn spotted the emergence of Isis much earlier than anybody else and wrote about it with a depth of understanding that was just in a league of its own. Nobody else was writing that stuff at that time, and the judges wondered whether the Government should considering pensioning off the whole of MI6 and hiring Patrick Cockburn instead.

“The breadth of his knowledge and his ability make connections is phenomenal.”

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