Raekha Prasad

Overview

Raekha Prasad is a freelance journalist and writer. She started her career three decades ago as a reporter on the Big Issue magazine before becoming a staff editor and writer on the Guardian. During her time at the Guardian, she edited several features’ sections and was a writer and news correspondent specialising in social justice - including disability rights, racism and women’s lives. She also reported from across Europe on issues about migration.

Moving to Delhi in 2004 to become a foreign correspondent covering South Asia for 5 years, she was The Times’ correspondent reporting on current affairs in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. She also worked as a freelance foreign feature writer producing long-form articles on subjects including caste violence, gender discrimination and the climate emergency for the Guardian, the Times, The Lancet, The Independent and the Observer. She worked on a BBC prime time docudrama about the world’s worst industrial disaster in Bhopal, India. Raekha also travelled across the region with international NGOs such as Greenpeace and ActionAid to report on global development stories for UK national newspapers.

Her most recent work focused on police accountability for the deaths of black men after being restrained by the police. She worked for two years with the charity Inquest, following the Black Lives Matter protests, to conceive, devise, research and write a landmark report into race and policing in Britain. The findings made headlines in major news organisations in the UK. Raekha also wrote a 5,000 word feature essay for the Guardian long read section in 2024 about her research and its significance. 

How race, gender and class impact on the criminal justice system has been a theme of Raekha’s work. She worked as a journalist on the Reading the Riots project, a ground-breaking collaboration between the Guardian and the London School of Economics to investigate the causes and consequences of the 2011 summer of violent disorder in Britain. She found and interviewed rioters. She also convinced police officers from forces across England to talk to the project and give their eye-witness accounts. She led a team of researchers for work that was published in academic journals. Raekha also wrote news stories and features for the Guardian and her interviews were used for a 2012 BBC verbatim drama about the riots. The project led to a government review and reform to the controversial stop-and-search policy.

Raekha taught journalism for six years at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her teaching focused on feature and news writing as well as long-form multimedia reporting. She joined City University’s journalism department in 2024 where she teaches at both postgraduate and undergraduate level as well as supervising final projects.

Books

Women of the Revolution: Forty Years of Feminism (Guardian Books) 2010 - reportage on female vigilantes in India

Bedside Guardian (Guardian Books) 2004 - featuring an opinion piece on the false promise of UN ‘protection areas’ for refugees

Lives and Works: Profiles of Contemporary Writers (Atlantic Books) 2002 - contributed a chapter featuring profile interview with Egyptian writer and feminist Nawal El Saadawi