Melanie McFadyean

Born in London on 24 November 1950, Melanie McFadyean was educated initially at Sherborne School for Girls, being expelled after a year, then joining her sister Andrea at Cranborne Chase School, about which she recalled: "I had to go in search of the rules in order to break them. It took me two and a half years to get expelled."[2]

McFadyean graduated with a first-class BA degree and subsequently an MA in English from Leeds University, and after leaving university taught art and then English in Hackney, London.[3] She served as an agony aunt for Just Seventeen magazine from its launch in 1983 until 1986, writing her "Dear Melanie" column, and was also involved with Robert Maciver in launching the teen magazine Kicks in 1985.[2][4][5]

After time spent in Northern Ireland, she co-wrote with Roisin McDonough and Eileen Fairweather a 1984 book, Only The Rivers Run Free: Northern Ireland, the Women's War, described by The Women's Review of Books as "passionate, compelling and absolutely necessary".[6] McFadyean co-wrote, with Margaret Renn, Thatcher's Reign: A Bad Case of the Blues (1984), then published a collection of short stories entitled Hotel Romantika in 1986, for the Virago Press Upstarts imprint for teenagers.

As a journalist, McFadyean worked at The Guardian and went on to freelance in radio and television, and in print for such papers, magazines and journals as The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, London Review of Books, Granta, The Independent, Cosmopolitan, and Marie Claire[2] and The Oldie (for the latter writing a column called "Pearls of Wisdom").[7] The focus of much of her journalism has been refugees and asylum seekers,[8] and spoken of being initially inspired by her own family story: "My mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany. She escaped but she had an aunt and an uncle who didn't, so I grew up with it, knowledge of refugees. But the thing that got me in to it was someone rang me up and asked if I had heard this story about children disappearing.... I have worked as a teacher, as an agony aunt and always had an affiliation with children and the idea that they were going missing…"[9]

McFadyean was consultant producer on the documentary film Guilty by Association, broadcast on BBC One on 7 July 2014.[10] She worked on a Channel 4 documentary, The Lost Boy, about a missing child, Ben Needham. Her radio work included a six-part BBC Radio 4 series on couples who have been together for three decades (Thirty Years and More) and a programme about the controversial child diarist Opal Whiteley.[11][12]

For 14 years from 2001 she was a lecturer in investigative journalism at City University's journalism department.[1] She went on to study for an MA in conflict resolution in divided societies, at King's College London.[1]

In 2001, McFadyean won a media award from Amnesty International for a piece about unaccompanied asylum-seeking children that was published in Guardian Weekend, and has served on their panel of judges.[9][13][1]

Her work as part of an investigation into the law of "joint enterprise" resulted in a report for The Bureau of Investigative Journalism that won the Bar Council Legal Reporting Award 2014.[1][14][15][16]

McFadyean was married to Malcolm Blair and they had a son, Rory.[17] Her mother, Marion Guttman, was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who came to England in 1937, and McFadyean's father, international lawyer Colin McFadyean, was a Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve in World War II who was later recruited by Ian Fleming to Naval Intelligence.[18] Her parents were married from 1940 until 1960, after which her father married Mary Malcolm.[9][19][20][21] McFadyean has written about the struggles faced by her father in later life to cope with her stepmother's dementia.[22] McFadyean wrote in The Guardian of her own experience of breast cancer.[23][24]

McFadyean died from cancer on 16 March 2023, at the age of 72.[2]

• Melanie McFadyean profile at The Guardian.
• Melanie McFadyean at The Independent.