Emma Jane Kirby is a reporter for the BBC, where she has worked as a foreign correspondent since 2001. She is currently a reporter with BBC Radio 4’s The World at One. For the last two years, much of her time has been spent on the migration trail. In 2015, she was awarded the Bayeux-Calvados Award for War Correspondents for her reporting on the Lampedusa disaster. A graduate of Oxford, she lives in London and Paris.

THE OPTICIAN OF LAMPEDUSA Based on a True Story Emma Jane Kirby One day in the fall of 2013, the unimaginable scale of the refugee crisis became clear to the only optician on the island of Lampedusa, an ordinary man in his fifties, and it changed him forever: as he was out boating with some friends, he encountered hundreds of men, women and children drowning in the aftermath of a shipwreck. More