Preeti Jha is an award-winning British journalist, based in London, who writes for publications worldwide including The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, The Washington Post, and Foreign Policy.
She started as a reporter for The Indian Express in New Delhi in 2007, covering education and the environment, before moving home to Wales to join the BBC’s Journalism Trainee Scheme. She later worked as a politics producer for the broadcaster in London, scrutinising the work of then Mayor Boris Johnson.
In 2012 Preeti set off for Asia again. This time to join Agence France-Presse in Hong Kong. She began as an editor on the Asia-Pacific desk and later became a Southeast Asia correspondent based in Bangkok. Her stories took her across the region – from the secret world of street racers in Hong Kong, to the organ trafficking trade in Cambodia and the growing democracy movement in Myanmar.
Preeti later went freelance to focus on long-form journalism about politics, gender, and human rights. She has reported on the underground feminists exposing misogyny in South Korea, the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, and the dangers faced by atheists in Malaysia. In 2021 she guest-edited a 24-page special edition about the return of junta rule in Myanmar, and the tremendous resistance movement that emerged in response, for New Internationalist.
Last year Preeti moved back to London where she is presently working as an editor for the new media organisation Semafor, splitting her time between the weekday Flagship newsletter and the website’s breaking news team. Alongside journalism, Preeti enjoys moderating events including a recent WHO forum about the future of health in the Asia-Pacific. Last year she began writing her first novel via a programme at Faber Academy, and this year she was selected for a place on the London Library’s Emerging Writers Programme. She is also a mentor at the London-based Refugee Journalism Project.
In 2009 Preeti won The Guardian’s International Development Journalism Award for a feature exploring how climate change was affecting nomadic herders in Kenya and Ethiopia. In 2016 she was part of an AFP team awarded a Human Rights Press Award for its reporting of the Rohingya migration crisis. And in 2018 and 2021 she was long-listed for the One World Media Awards for features about hijabi cosplayers and women so-called drug mules. Last year she was part of the Global Press Journal team that won the OWM Women’s Solutions Reporting Award.