Robert Verkaik is an author and journalist specialising in extremism and education. He writes for the Guardian, Independent, the i, Observer, Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times. In 2013 he was runner-up in the specialist journalist category at the National Press Awards and he has previously been longlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Paul Foot Award. Before becoming a freelance journalist, he was the security editor for the Mail on Sunday and the home affairs editor and law editor for the Independent, where he worked for twelve years.
Since the 9/11 attacks, Verkaik has covered the ‘War on Terror’, visiting the US detention camp at Guantánamo Bay and interviewing victims of torture in Syria. He has also headed media campaigns against ‘secret justice’ and in support of greater press freedoms. More recently he has been writing about the causes of extremism and social immobility. In 2016 he tracked Mohammed Emwazi’s path from London schoolboy to Islamic State executioner in Jihadi John: The Making of a Terrorist, which is also published by Oneworld.
As well as being a journalist, Verkaik is a qualified non-practising barrister, called to Bar in 2007. He lives in Surrey.