Marie Colvin: A Modern Muse

It is with great sadness that we learn today that Marie Colvin, the prolific Sunday Times journalist, has been killed in Syria this morning in a rocket attack.

Marie was one of the ‘Modern Muses’ in The English Group’s collection of portraits of influential women, photographed by Bryan Adams, and she was a pleasure to meet and feature within the monograph and later exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

Marie Colvin was an award-winning foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times who has covered the Middle East for twenty years. From sharing trenches with the Kosovo Liberation Army to being hit by a grenade while covering the Sri Lankan civil war, Colvin has never flinched from the modern world’s worst conflicts. Keenly aware of the power of the media to show the horrors of war, she risked her life by staying behind at the UN refugee compound in East Timor in 2000, after being advised to leave with other journalists. In Chechnya, in 1999, Colvin had faced even greater danger when, along with a group of Chechen rebels, she was repeatedly attacked by Russian jet fighters. She was forced to walk for days through desolate, ice-covered mountains to the Georgian border to escape, fending off both Caucasian bandits and Russian paratroopers. And in 2001, she was hit by shrapnel whilst trying to cross into safe territory in Sri Lanka, losing both her left eye and her hearing in one ear. Colvin was the winner of the 2000 IWMF Courage Award.

The image of Marie here is her portrait from the Modern Muses collection.

Via The English Group.