Liz Cookman

Liz Cookman is a freelance foreign correspondent based in Ukraine, having relocated to the country in the tense months preceding Russia’s full-scale invasion and remaining throughout the full-scale war. She currently lives in Kyiv after stints in Dnipro and Mariupol.

Liz focuses on the human cost of the conflict, producing on-the-ground reports, in-depth features and investigations for international outlets, including The Economist 1843, The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Sunday Times. In 2024, she was named both Best Print Journalist and Best Specialist Journalist at the Freelance Journalism Awards, and won the inaugural The Irish Times Dave McKechnie Memorial Journalism Prize.

In 2023, her work was recognised with Amnesty International’s Gaby Rado New Journalist Award. She has also been nominated for the Bayeux-Calvados Award for War Correspondents two years in a row, the Kurt Schork Prize and the Society of Editors' Freelance Journalist of the Year. She is the recipient of a Howard G. Buffett reporting grant from the International Women’s Media Foundation.

Liz previously covered the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and its fallout from both Armenia and Azerbaijan for Foreign Policy and The Washington Post. She has been based in Turkey and the Middle East, and speaks intermediate Turkish.