Hella Pick, the Guardian’s esteemed and pioneering former foreign correspondent and diplomatic editor, has died at the age of 96.
Her career spanned more than seven decades, during which she covered geopolitical upheavals and tectonic shifts in global power, and met numerous world leaders. Her last article, on the war in Gaza, was published in January.
Pick’s godchildren Matthew Fyjis-Walker and Jemima Fyjis-Walker said she died in the early hours of Thursday. Although she was very weak and struggled to speak, she had insisted on listening to the lunchtime news on Wednesday, a day of particularly bleak reports.
After breaking into the male-dominated world of foreign affairs journalism in the 1950s, Pick worked for the Guardian for more than 30 years, inspiring and intimidating younger colleagues in equal measure. She was at her journalistic peak in the pre-internet years, when tenacity, resilience, patience and charm were among the essential characteristics for success.
Katharine Viner, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, said: “Hella was an incredible force and an inspiration. She had unrivalled contacts and immense knowledge about world affairs and was always steely in her determination to find out the facts.
“When she started out, there were very few women foreign correspondents, but she soon won the admiration and respect of colleagues both within the Guardian and in the wider world. Her personal history as a refugee from the Nazis shaped her life. That she was still working up until a few weeks ago is a testament to her dedication and grit.”
Pick was born in Vienna in 1927, and spent her early childhood in what she described as a “very conventional middle-class environment”. But after the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, and attacks on Jews rose sharply, her mother decided to put her 11-year-old daughter on a Kindertransport train for the UK.
“I don’t remember the journey itself. I have a complete blank. It’s somehow been blotted out of my mind and my memory,” she said when her memoir, Invisible Walls, was published in 2021.
After school and university, her first job in journalism, on a London-based magazine, West Africa, began in 1958. Three years later, she began freelancing for the Guardian. She was taken on to the staff as UN correspondent in 1962 and left as diplomatic editor in the mid-1990s.
“When I started work, women who were doing any kind of political foreign affairs reporting were really very, very thin on the ground,” she said in an interview with the Guardian in 2021.
She also remarked on how technology had changed journalism. “In terms of how you actually pursue your craft, the world of today bears very little relationship to the one I started out in. But you still need people to trust you, you need to have an inquisitive mind and good antennae for priorities.”
Paul Webster, the editor of the Observer, and a former foreign editor of the Guardian, said: “Hella was unique, a formidable journalist with an extraordinary grasp of the complexities of cold war Europe and a contacts book to match.
“She knew senior figures from the chancelleries of capitals on both sides of the iron curtain, and used her imperious presence and huge charm to great effect to provide the Guardian with fine coverage of those fraught days. She was both grand and generous in equal measure, and a much-admired part of the Guardian’s coverage during the final tumultuous days of the cold war.”
Simon Tisdall, another former foreign editor of the Guardian, said: “Hella was a force to be reckoned with. Fiercely intelligent, passionate about all she did, incredibly well connected in the exclusive world of international diplomacy – and ever courageous in navigating a male-dominated journalistic profession that feared powerful women.
“Hella was indomitable, a trailblazer who overcame childhood trauma in the Nazi era to become a star of modern British journalism. She was a great friend and colleague.”
Alan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian and now the editor of Prospect magazine, said: “Hella was at the heart of virtually every major diplomatic event since the early 1960s. She was utterly formidable in her determination to get the story. Her range of contacts was extraordinary and her knowledge encyclopaedic.
“Well into her 90s she was writing elegant long-form pieces for Prospect magazine, including an article drawing sobering parallels between the war she fled as a Kindertransport child in 1939 and the rise of Putin. She was one of a kind.”
Pick’s 2021 memoir was a “book of great power and honesty, packed with vivid detail of her reporting adventures”, wrote the BBC veteran foreign correspondent Fergal Keane in his review for the Guardian.
Describing her as a “trailblazer for a generation”, he wrote: “Pick is testament to the necessity of having a broad intellectual hinterland and an open mind, the value of cultivating sources and finding things out. There is no better manifesto against the current clickbait culture and narcissistic social media obsession.”
Emma Graham-Harrison, senior international affairs correspondent for the Guardian, became friends with Pick after interviewing her in 2021. “Hella was an inspiration as a trailblazer, as a journalist and as a friend. Her intelligence and determination allowed her to carve a career in a world that was deeply hostile to women journalists – particularly foreign correspondents – and made so much possible for those of us following in her footsteps.” she said.
“She was probably the oldest working journalist in the UK, and was deeply engaged with the world, even as she was leaving it. The days before her death, weak and in hospital, she still wanted to talk about her horror at the situation in Gaza and her fear for Ukraine’s future, with Europe and America distracted and divided.
“Always interested in people, she was open to making new friends all through her life, even into her 90s. I was lucky, and honoured, to be one of them.”
Helena Kennedy, the barrister, who was a close friend of Pick’s, said: “Hella was a truly remarkable woman, erudite and cultured. Geopolitics was her life blood. She thrived on stimulating debate and loved to entertain. Her gatherings always had elegance and style. She was a true grande dame of the press.”
Misha Glenny, another veteran foreign correspondent, said he had last seen Pick in December in Vienna when she received the Golden Medal of Merit from the city of her birth. From there, she went to Berlin to be guest of honour at an exhibition commemorating the Kindertransport in the Bundestag. “Together, the two events gave her a certain closure,” said Glenny.
He said he first met Pick in 1986 as a “green freelance reporter, grappling with my first very big foreign story. I had been reading Hella for years. Her authoritative style and her heightened perception of political trends had inspired me and, I am sure, many others to pursue the dream of becoming a foreign correspondent.”
As he walked to meet her for a coffee, he said, “I was almost shaking with trepidation. But we were friends from that day on. I will for ever remain in her debt. Ceaselessly upbeat, inquisitive and questioning, Hella was a giant of 20th century British journalism but in a class of her own. She will be missed by so many.”
