David Loyn

David Loyn (born 1 March 1954) has been a foreign correspondent since the late 1970s, mostly with the BBC. He is an authority on Afghan history.

Loyn was educated at Oundle School, a boarding independent school in the historic market town of Oundle on the River Nene in Northamptonshire, in the East Midlands region of England, where he boarded at Bramston House, followed by Christ Church at the University of Oxford.

Loyn worked as a radio correspondent for IRN for eight years, and in 1987 he joined the BBC as a TV correspondent. He was the BBC’s International Development correspondent, a post he vacated at the end of July, 2015.

Loyn has frequently sought to report on the motivation of insurgent groups, including interviews with Hamas and Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon, Maoist Naxalite rebels in India, Kashmiri separatists, and the Kosovo Liberation Army. He has conducted several significant exclusive interviews with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Loyn’s reporting career included the following highlights:

Loyn has written extensively on how international development issues are reported. He has been a long-term advocate of better understanding of the effects of reporting violence, both on the journalists and for those on the receiving end. He is on the European board of the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma. He is also a member of the Dart Society, which brings together journalists on both sides of the Atlantic. But Loyn has been an opponent of a school of journalism known as ‘Peace News’, and debated with its supporters both in public and in a widely cited academic discourse.

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