Darrow, Siobhan 1960-

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DARROW, Siobhan 1960-

PERSONAL:

Born 1960, in Belfast, Northern Ireland; married a Russian fashion photographer (divorced); married Shep Faison (a journalist). Education: Duke University, B.A. (Russian); studied at the Pushkin Institute, Moscow.

ADDRESSES:

Home—California. Agent—c/o Virago Press, Brettenham House, Lancaster Place, London WC2E 7EN, England.

CAREER:

Journalist. NBC, Moscow, USSR; CNN, Atlanta, GA, producer, 1986-91, correspondent in the Moscow bureau, 1991-95, correspondent in the London bureau, 1995-98, correspondent in the Los Angeles bureau, 1998-2001.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Emmy award nomination, 1994, for reports on Chechnya.

WRITINGS:

Flirting with Danger: Confessions of a Reluctant War Reporter, Virago Press (London, England), 2000.

SIDELIGHTS:

Siobhan Darrow is an Emmy-nominated television journalist who worked for CNN for fifteen years. Darrow's memoir of these years, Flirting with Danger: Confessions of a Reluctant War Reporter, was published in 2000.

Darrow grew up in Belfast and New Jersey, and in 1980, after majoring in Russian language and literature in college, she moved to Moscow. There she met and married a Russian fashion photographer and began working for NBC news. In 1986, she moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where she logged tapes in the basement offices of the fledgling Cable News Network (CNN). Before long, she began producing CNN's "World Report" and "International News." Over the next decade, Darrow covered many of the world's hot spots, including the collapse of the Soviet Union, wars in the Balkans and Chechnya, and conflicts in Israel and Albania. She was attached to CNN's London office in the mid-1990s, and there she covered the death of the Princess of Wales, as well as the breakdown of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland and the birth of Dolly, the world's first cloned sheep.

In Flirting with Danger, Darrow recounts her various adventures as a front-line journalist, but also reveals the personal demons which led her from relationship to relationship and finally caused her to question her priorities. According to Julia Llewellyn Smith, who reviewed the book in Times Literary Supplement, "Darrow is an honest and humorous narrator, whose recollections of life in a war zone … make a refreshing change to the usual gung-ho accounts." Similarly, Jane S. Drabkin in School Library Journal praised Flirting with Danger as "an intimate, revealing description of [Darrow's] life." The reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted that for news enthusiasts the book "offers memorable snapshots of life on the front lines," while a commentator in Kirkus Reviews praised the narrative as "warm and engaging: a piquant slice of a colorful life."