Staying Alive

A memoir from John Sweeney exploring his extraordinary career from rookie local journalist to fearless foreign reporter.

John Sweeney tells stories power and money don't want told. As a war reporter he took crazy risks from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and everywhere else in between. In former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone and Gaza, he lost friends: killed in the firing line of duty. Years later, the BBC got rid of him when had a go at another cult, the one run by Tommy Robinson. Freelance, he headed to Ukraine, staying in the capital for the whole of the Battle of Kyiv.

Staying Alive is the autobiography of a reporter who has criticised Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump to their faces. In Siberia, Sweeney got punched in the guts; in New York, the Trump organisation put out an attack video against him. When not going undercover in North Korea or Chechnya or Zimbabwe, in Britain he made documentaries on cot death mothers Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and Donna Anthony, that they were not guilty of murdering their babies. Thanks, in part, to Sweeney, they were all freed. In 2023, on the day when nurse Lucy Letby was first convicted of killing seven babies, Sweeney tweeted: "Sometimes the law gets it wrong."

It is the story of someone who is a free spirit, not afraid to confront real monsters or to stand up for those falsely accused of being monsters. But all of that leaves scar tissue. The book opens with Sweeney sitting in a psychiatrist's waiting room, on sick leave from the BBC, broken by too many battles.

It is a book written by someone who has seen the darkest things people can do to each other but also that information is light, that laughter can light up a prison cell, that love and friendship can keep people going through the worst of times.

As information becomes more poisoned by the day, Staying Alive sets out the human cost paid by the people who tell truth to power

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