Frontierlands

Hazel Sheffield was a Fulbright scholar in digital media at the Columbia Journalism School in New York. She works as a freelance journalist and investigative reporter for the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times, and many other national and international publications. In 2021, she was shortlisted for environment and energy journalist of the year at the British Journalism Awards.

Hazel was the business editor of the Independent until summer 2016, when she left to found farnearer.org. This multi-grant-winning project documents self-organising communities and economic alternatives. In 2019, Far Nearer was highly commended in the Georgina Henry Award for Innovation at the Society Of Editors’ Press Awards. In 2021, Hazel returned to these communities for her newsletter series Revisiting Britain.

In 2020, Hazel co-ordinated a cross-border team investigating the impact of Europe’s renewable energy subsidies on Eastern Europe’s forests, with a grant from the European Union’s IJ4EU fund. Money to Burn was published across 10 newsrooms including the Guardian, Die Zeit Online and Publico. The investigation has been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Sigma Data Awards, Covering Climate Now Awards and the IJ4EU Impact Award. It was highly commended in the innovation category at the 2021 European Press Prize.

Hazel regularly runs writing workshops and speaks at events, including Hacks Hackers London, Arena’s DataHarvest festival and IJ4EU’s Uncovered conference. In 2022/3, she was a European Journalism Fellow at the Freie Universität in Berlin. Frontierlands is her first book.