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JEAN RAFFERTY
JEAN RAFFERTY'S JOURNALISM
Jean Rafferty is an award-winning journalist with a wide range. She worked for a variety of both broadsheet and tabloid publications, from the Sunday Times Magazine to the Sunday People, doing lengthy pieces on subjects such as torture, suicide, murder and prostitution for Guardian Weekend Magazine and the Sunday Herald, as well as enjoying light-hearted comment for daily newspapers.
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Jean Rafferty has been called one of the UK's top feature writers, 'a stylist.' No matter how trivial the subject matter she is asked to write about - and topics have included a karate-teaching nun, a weekend away with a rugby club and a dog psychologist - she engages totally with her subject.
Rafferty's lightness of touch led her to do many humorous articles at the beginning of her career, but her powerful social conscience impelled her to explore darker subjects such as Satanic ritual abuse, suicide, torture and prostitution.
Rafferty is not afraid of controversial subjects and is prepared to look unflinchingly at unfashionable subjects. In the citation for her Norwich Union award-winning article on the feeding of the elderly in hospitals, the judges said, 'This was beautifully written, and a powerful piece. It exposed a topic that is often brushed under the carpet and the people who run hospitals need to sit up and take notice of an article like this.'
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In 2007 she was shortlisted in the British Press Awards (one of only two freelance journalists to be nominated) for her article in The Independent on the death of a friend and the impact of death on the baby boomers' generation.
She won the 2005 Rosemary Goodchild Award for her 'gutsy and clever' article on abortion in the Sunday Herald and was also shortlisted in the Norwich Union Medical Journalism Awards that year for her Sunday Herald piece on Kylie Minogue's breast cancer.
In 2003 she won a Joseph Rowntree Foundation journalist's fellowship for her work on prostitution. This funding enabled her to travel to several European countries to research different ways of dealing with the sex industry.
She won the National Daily Category in the 1999 Travelex Travel Writing Awards for her 'inspired piece' on Buenos Aires and was shortlisted for Feature Writer of the Year in the 1997 British Press awards for her work on ritual abuse and rape.
Read two of Rafferty's many articles on the following pages:
Prostitution in Glasgow, an abridged version of her article that appeared in Guardian Weekend during Glasgow's notorious run of prostitute murders in the 1990s
Caring for the Elderly, her prize-winning entry to the Norwich Union Medical Journalism Awards, originally published in the Sunday Herald.
My latest article can be read in the Dundee Courier:
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​https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/opinion/2536892/opinion-how-did-waste-become-our-way-of-life/
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