Marie Colvin in Tahir Square, Cairo, in 2011. Photo by Ivor Prickett/The Sunday Times
Marie Colvin was a Long Island native and acclaimed war correspondent, tragically killed in Syria on February 22, 2012, while covering the conflict for The Sunday Times of London. She was known for her moving accounts of innocent civilians caught in the tide of war, and for her courage, tenacity and indefatigable commitment to truth-seeking.
Colvin’s career spanned 30 years and took her to conflict zones around the globe, including East Timor, Zimbabwe, Libya, Tunisia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Iraq and Sri Lanka.
Energetic, passionate and wry, Colvin dedicated her life to giving voice to the voiceless. She was a two-time recipient of the British Foreign Correspondent Reporter of the Year Award, the recipient of the Foreign Press Association’s Journalist of the Year award, and the International Women’s Media Foundation award for Courage in Journalism for her coverage of Kosovo and Chechnya.
Colvin made international headlines in 1999 after refusing to evacuate a United Nations compound under attack by Indonesian-backed forces in East Timor. She stayed as other journalists fled. The stand-off brought attention to the plight of 1,500 women and children, who as a result were eventually evacuated to safety.
In later years, she was recognizable by a trademark black eye patch, which she wore after losing her left eye to shrapnel from a grenade fired by the Sri Lankan army. Her life was marked by many such stories – from her access to Muammar Qaddafi and Yasser Arafat to an escape from Chechnya across an icy, 12,000-foot mountain range – adding up to an astounding body of work and a singular legacy.
The Stony Brook School of Journalism has established the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting in the same spirit with which Colvin lived her extraordinary life—as an inspiration to young journalists and to young women in particular.