Carole Cadwalladr in conversation with Professor Emma Smith

On 2 October 2026, our annual John Donne Lecture saw award-winning journalist, writer and podcaster Carole Cadwalladr (English, 1988) in conversation with Professor of Shakespeare Studies Emma Smith, discussing the art of storytelling in journalism.

As an investigative journalist, Carole Cadwalladr was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for National Reporting in 2019, receiving praise upon her investigation and coverage into Cambridge Analytica and its role in Brexit. In April 2019, she gave a TED talk Facebook’s role in Brexit – and the threats to democracy, regarding the links found between Facebook and the Brexit election. This talk led to worldwide acclaim, but it also sparked a three-year long lawsuit which was won by Carole in June 2022. Carole was also featured in the Bafta nominated film The Great Hack which explored the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal.

She has written for the Guardian and was a feature writer for the Observer for twenty years, having previously worked at The Daily Telegraph. She is now an independent writer and among her projects, she writes a newsletter for SubStack How to Survive the Broligarchy – with more than 65,000 subscribers. In 2025, she co-hosted a BBC podcast ‘Stalked’ which was a top five podcast on BBC sounds. Carole has also won many awards, including the British Journalism Awards: Technology Journalism Award in December 2017 and The Orwell Prize for political journalism in 2018. She is the author of ‘The Family Tree’, published in 2006, and was shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Watch the full conversation below.