Charlotte Eagar
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Charlotte Eagar (born 1965) is a British journalist,[1] filmmaker, and novelist. She is known for her work The Girl in the Film, New Hall: The History of England in One House and The Trojan Women Project which includes productions of Queens of Syria and Oliver!. She is also a war correspondent and foreign affairs journalist for many publications including Newsweek, The Spectator, The Times, and previously the Sunday Telegraph.
Eagar read Classics at Oxford University and has a postgraduate diploma in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from Edinburgh University. Her early life was spent in London and Shropshire, where her father the Irish/English cricketer and hockey player, Michael Eagar, was a housemaster.[citation needed]
Career
In 1986, Eager was an apprentice dress-designer for the couturier Victor Edelstein in 1986, where she helped make dresses for, among others, the late Princess of Wales.[2] She started working at the Evening Standard and Daily Mail while still at university. Her first foreign story was covering the 1989 Romanian Revolution for The Scotsman as a freelancer. After spending some months covering the collapse of the former USSR in 1992, based in Kyiv and Moscow, and travelling and reporting widely throughout the Caucasus and Central Asia, as a freelancer, Eagar moved to Bosnia, where she became The Observer's Balkans Correspondent, based in Sarajevo during the siege.[3] She covered the war in Bosnia until its end in 1996.[4] Her 2008 novel, The Girl in The Film, is inspired by her experiences during the war.
In the mid-1990s, Eagar moved back to London. After working as acting Deputy Features Editor of The Scotsman, with a column on Scotland on Sunday, she became Assistant Features Editor of the Mail on Sunday, and, in 1999, Deputy Features Editor of the Sunday Telegraph. After living in Rome for two years to work on her novel The Girl in the Film, she returned to be Contributing Editor on the Evening Standard magazine, specializing in investigative features, in the UK and abroad, and later Senior Editor of Tatler.[5]
Eagar also continued to write for many other publications – including Prospect,[6] The Spectator, and the Sunday Times Magazine,[7] continuing her interest in foreign affairs, writing from Iraq for the Times Magazine in 2004 about the boom in governments sub-contracting security in war zones to private security firms[8] and the looting of artworks from Baghdad's Iraq Museum and for [9] the Mail on Sunday, from places such as Afghanistsan (2006 – investigating alleged fraud by the British government on Afghan poppy farmers in Helmand); to South Korea (2008), investigating refugees being smuggled from North Korea to South Korea and covering the Somali pirate crisis in 2011–12.[10]
In 2012, she joined Newsweek as a Contributing Editor and was sent on assignment to various countries, including Italy and Bosnia, where she covered Srebrenica's DNA identification programme,[11] among other stories. Her 2016 piece for Granta,[12] "The Colonel's New Life", followed a Syrian family making the journey by boat and land from Turkey to Germany.
Eagar was the Conservative Party candidate in Liverpool Wavertree in the 2024 United Kingdom general election. Receiving 1,887 votes (4.7%) of the vote, and losing her deposit.[13]
Films
In 2009–10 Eagar and her husband, William Stirling, co-wrote and co-produced their first film, Scooterman,[14] a short rom com starring Ed Stoppard and Georgina Rylance, directed and co-produced by Kirsten Cavendish (to watch Scooterman click on a link cited here).[15] Scooterman was in Cannes Short Film Corner (2010)[16] and won Audience-rated Best of the Fest at the LA Comedy Festival and Palm Springs.
Eagar has also exec-produced and produced several documentaries as part of her work at the Trojan Women Project, including Queens of Syria, The World to Hear, and The Trojans 2019 Edinburgh Festival, and Queens of Syria 2016 Young Vic/Developing Artists co-production theatrical performance films.[17]
Since 2007, Eagar has occasionally devised and run communication campaigns, first for her own projects, such as The Girl in the Film[18]and Scooter man.[19][20]