ROGER FEW

Professorial Research Fellow at University of East Anglia

By Honey Wyatt

What is the most useful skill you learned at City that you still use today?

The importance of rhythm, structure and creative expression in communication. The training at City set me on the path to professional writing and editing.

Who is a person you fnd inspiring?

It’s not a person, it is the extraordinary people I meet in my research projects on disaster risk, climate change, and confict. The focus of my work is documenting and analysing experiences of economically and politically marginalised social groups in lower-income countries – people at the sharp end of environmental change and injustice. People who show capacities to adapt and challenge the social structures that heighten their vulnerability.

What do you consider the highlight of your career?

Being able to travel to so many wonderful places. It has been a privilege to work with people in Colombia displaced by confict who are now fghting for their rights to create new homes in the informal spaces of cities.

SARAH BAILEY Periodical International Editor-at-large Vogue Greece

By Kiran Duggal

If you could sum up your experience at City, in three words, what would they be?

Discipline, ambition, ignited.

Do you have a piece of work that you are proudest of?

It would probably be my profle on Madonna for Harper’s Bazaar US. I was so unbelievably nervous about it; I nearly passed out in the interview.

I felt proud of myself as Barbara Charone, the legendary publicist of Madonna, said to me afterwards, ‘you got her and not everybody does’ and that was all the praise I needed practically for my whole career.

What is the one news story you wish you could have broken?

I visited an anti-censorship beneft that Salman Rushdie was speaking at and it was at the time the bookbinding had just begun. I just didn’t have the cajones to go up and interview him. I’ve regretted that ever since. It was a real lesson learned. If there’s an opportunity to talk to someone behind the story, even when doing a lifestyle piece. I always do. That experience of chickening out has stayed with me and haunted me.