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Hello and welcome to Women with Balls, where I, Katie Balls, talk to today's trailblazers.

Today I'm delighted to be joined by Iona Craig, the foreign reporter.

Craig is a freelance investigative journalist who has focused on Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula since 2010.

Since March 2015, Iona has been the only international journalist to repeatedly cross the front lines

to report on both sides of Yemen's ongoing conflict and humanitarian crisis.

Her work has won multiple awards. She was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2014, where the judges said of her work,

often alone and risking her life, Iona has for almost four years given a voice to the ordinary people of Yemen.

She was awarded the 2016 All-World Prize for Journalism, and most recently she has co-created an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum North in Old Traffat, Yemen, inside a crisis, which opens today, running until late January.

So, Oana, thanks very much for joining us today.

Pleasure to be here.

So to begin on this podcast, we like to go back to what you were doing before you were in

your current role.

And you didn't have the most traditional route into journalism, you could say, because

you were a horse trainer and jockey for 13 years.

Were you always a risk taker?

No, not at all. In fact, I don't think I'm a risk taker at all. I'm very stubborn.

I think that's more about me than necessarily as bravery. Stubbendness. I think I had that from

being a small child. But yeah, I wanted to do journalism when I was at school, but I was not a very good student and also dyslexic.

And grew up in a time before computers and spell check.

...