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Veteran foreign author and correspondent Robert Fisk died after suffering a suspected stroke at his home in Dublin.
It is known that the journalist felt ill on Friday and was admitted to the San Vicente hospital, where he died shortly after. He was 74 years old,
Fisk was one of the most respected and controversial British foreign correspondents of the modern era and was described by the New York Times in 2005 as “probably Britain’s most famous foreign correspondent”.
He had a long relationship with Ireland dating back to 1972 when he moved to Belfast to work as a Northern Ireland correspondent for the London Times at the height of the unrest.
He subsequently did his Ph.D. at Trinity College, completing a thesis on the neutrality of Ireland during World War II. He had a house in Dalkey where he lived for many years.
His career in journalism began with the London Sunday Express but that relationship was brief and he soon moved to the Times.
After making a name for himself reporting from Northern Ireland for that newspaper, Fisk briefly moved to Portugal and then Beirut, where he worked as a Middle East correspondent, once again for the Times.
He covered, among other events, the Lebanese civil war, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war.
He joined the London Independent in 1989 after a dispute with the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper and continued to work for that publication until his death. It is understood that he was planning his return to the Middle East in recent days.
United States Critic
He reported extensively on the first Gulf War and was based for a time in Baghdad, where he was fiercely critical of other foreign correspondents whom he accused of covering the conflict from their hotel rooms.
He also covered the US-led war wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and frequently condemned US involvement in the region. Fisk was one of the few Western journalists to interview Osama Bin Laden, something he did three times in the 1990s.
He also covered five Israeli invasions, the Algerian civil war, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, and the Arab revolutions of 2011. He worked in the Balkans during the conflict there and more recently covered the conflict in Syria.
He received numerous awards throughout his career, including the Orwell Prize for Journalism, International Journalist of the Year from the British Press Awards, and Foreign Reporter of the Year on multiple occasions.
He received honorary degrees and doctorates from universities in various countries. And in 2009 he was awarded the Trinity College Dublin Historical Society gold medal, awarded to those who have made a significant contribution in the public sphere to furthering society’s ideals of debate, discussion and public discourse.
Among his most respected books are The Point of No Return: The Strike Which Broke the British in Ulster, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, and The Great War for Civilization – The Conquest of the Middle East.
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