Multi award-winning The Sunday Times journalist Christina Lamb is “absolutely thrilled” to have been awarded an Honorary Fellowship from University College Oxford.

Chief foreign correspondent Christina is the first female former undergraduate to be elected an Honorary Fellow at the historic college. Christina, 52, is one of Britain’s leading foreign reporters and a best-selling author. She has won 14 major awards, including Foreign Correspondent of the Year five times and Europe’s top war reporting prize, the Prix Bayeux. Christina was made an OBE in 2013.

She was the first person in her family to go to university. After graduating in PPE, she moved to Peshawar in 1987 to cover the mujaheddin fighting the Soviet Union, and within two years had been named Young Journalist of the Year.

In 2016 she won the Foreign Press Association award for Feature of the Year for reporting on the Chibok girls in Nigeria, and in 2015 was named Amnesty International’s Newspaper Journalist of the Year for reporting from inside Libyan detention centres. She was recently presented with the Sue Lloyd-Roberts/UNHCR award for her writing on refugees.

Her postings have included South Africa, Pakistan, Brazil and Washington and she has recently reported on the child refugee disappearances in Europe, and on the Yazidi women abducted by ISIS in Iraq and kept as sex slaves.

Christina has written eight books, is a patron of Afghan Connection and on the board of the Institute of War and Peace Reporting.

She has given talks all over the world, from NATO conferences to the annual Avon Ladies convention, and her portrait has been in the National Portrait Gallery and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

Christina has been awarded the Honorary Fellowship in recognition of her courageous, vivid and critically important journalism, as well as for her support of the college.

Christina said: “I’m absolutely thrilled about the Fellowship. Many unexpected things have come about as the result of me heading off on a Flying Coach to Pakistan’s North-West Frontier 30 years ago to try and become a foreign correspondent.

“But becoming the first female undergraduate of my college to be named an Honorary Fellow is most unexpected of all. I was the first person in my family to go to university and I loved my time at uni so I’m very thrilled and particularly to join such luminaries as Stephen Hawking and Bill Clinton.”