Suyin Haynes

Overview

Suyin Haynes is a lecturer, researcher and writer focused on storytelling at the intersections of identity, culture and underrepresented communities. 

She has worked for more than a decade in journalism, starting her career at TIME magazine first as an Audience Editor in the Hong Kong bureau, then as a Senior Reporter covering gender, culture and underrepresented communities from the London bureau. Suyin's coverage at TIME included the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, experiences of persecution under the Myanmar coup, and LGBTQ+ rights in central and eastern Europe. She has written two cover stories for TIME — both involving train travel across Europe with Greta Thunberg. From 2021-2023, she was Head of Editorial at gal-dem, the award-winning media company committed to sharing the perspectives of people of colour from marginalised genders. 

As a freelance journalist, Suyin's writing and reporting covers the intersections of identity, culture and underrepresented communities, and her work has been published in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, CNN, the Guardian, Jacobin and more. As a media consultant, she specialises in working with values-driven organisations on communications, campaigns and storytelling. She is the creator of Ginkgo Leaves, a newsletter inspired by the ginkgo tree, and is the co-founder of fragments, a newsletter exploring sibling grief in all its forms. Suyin is also a published short fiction story writer. 

Suyin joined City as a Visiting Lecturer in 2023 on the MA Magazine programme. In 2024, she became a part time Lecturer, specialising in magazine journalism across the BA and MA programmes. Suyin has supervised a number of successful final projects at the postgraduate level that have later been published in national outlets. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice, and is currently working towards her MA in the same subject. 

In 2026, Suyin completed her MA South East and Pacific Asian Studies at SOAS, University of London. She is now an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Researcher based at the University of Westminster and the Royal Geographical Society, where her PhD research explores collaborative pedagogical approaches to interpreting colonial visual culture.