Marie Catherine Colvin (12 January 1956 – 22 February 2012) was an award-winning American journalist who worked for the British newspaper The Sunday Times from 1985 until her death. She died while covering the siege of Homs in Syria.
Colvin started her career in New York City as a midnight-to-6 a.m. police reporter for United Press International (UPI), a year after graduating from Yale. In 1984, Colvin became the Paris bureau chief for UPI, moving to The Sunday Times in 1985.
From 1986, she was the newspaper’s Middle East correspondent, and then from 1995 was the Foreign Affairs correspondent. In 1986, she was the first to interview Muammar Gaddafi after Operation El Dorado Canyon.
Specialising in the Middle East, she also covered conflicts in Chechnya, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and East Timor. In 1999 in East Timor, she was credited with saving the lives of 1,500 women and children from a compound besieged by Indonesian-backed forces. Refusing to abandon them, she stayed with a United Nations force, reporting in her newspaper and on television. They were evacuated after four days. She won the International Women’s Media Foundation award for Courage in Journalism for her coverage of Kosovo and Chechnya. She wrote and produced documentaries, including Arafat: Behind the Myth for the BBC
Colvin lost the sight in her left eye due to a blast by a Sri Lankan Army rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) on 16 April 2001 while crossing from a LTTE controlled area to a Government controlled area; thereafter she wore an eyepatch
