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About

Jem Bartholomew is an award-winning freelance reporter, with a focus on writing narrative nonfiction about poverty, social exclusion and other topics.

He recently wrote two chapters for the book “Broke: Fixing Britain’s Poverty Crisis” (Biteback, 2023), one about the UK homelessness crisis and another about courier drivers’ fight to unionize. It became Book of the Week in the London Review Bookshop. You can order the book here.

Jem has written for a range of UK and US publications, including The Guardian, Economist and Wall Street Journal, where he’s written eight front-page stories. Between June 2022 and 2023, he was a reporting fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, part of Columbia University in New York, reporting on media, press freedom, disinformation and politics for Columbia Journalism Review.

Jem’s reporting won him ‘Best Newcomer 2019’ at the State Street Institutional Press Awards (for an investigative story into equity holdings in British private prisons), made a longlist for ‘New Freelance Writer 2021’ at the UK Freelance Writing Awards (for coverage of food banks), and was ‘Highly Commended’ at the 2024 NUJ/Orwell Society Young Journalist Awards (for a piece on homelessness).

Jem spent his early childhood in council housing in southwest England and attended a state school in Exeter, Devon. He went to university at Oxford and received a master’s degree from Columbia. He was the recipient of Columbia University’s 2023 Tony Horwitz Fellowship, and has been awarded funding from Fulbright, Study Hall and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

He teaches a short course on longform nonfiction writing at City St George’s, University of London—with one scholarship available each class to an 18-25-year-old writer from an under-represented background and/or someone facing financial difficulty—and he has a Substack newsletter on media representations of poverty.

You can contact him at jem.bartholomew@gmail.com. For confidential tips, you can reach him at jem.bartholomew@proton.me or email to request his Signal information. He recently deleted his X account and will no longer be using the platform.