Ismail Einashe is an award-winning British-Somali journalist and writer. His reporting and essays on migration, human rights and art have appeared in a wide range of international publications – including The Guardian, Foreign Policy, BBC News, The Sunday Times, The Nation and ArtReview.
He is the author of Strangers (2023), a book by Tate Publishing that explores migration through the lens of art. He also co-edited Lost in Media: Migrant Perspectives and the Public Sphere (2019), a collection of critical essays examining how migrants are represented in European media.
As a leading member of the cross-border investigative collective Lost in Europe, Einashe investigates the disappearance of child migrants. He was a 2025–26 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, where he examined migration reporting through the lens of trauma and art. His global reporting also includes a 2019 Alicia Patterson Fellowship, during which he documented China’s influence in Africa.
His investigative work has received several major awards. In 2024, his work with Lost in Europe won the European Parliament’s Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize for Journalism for revealing that more than 50,000 migrant children disappeared across Europe between 2021 and 2023. In 2019, his three-year investigation into how a group of Bangladeshi shopkeepers took on the Cosa Nostra mafia in Sicily won a Migration Media Award and was a finalist for the European Press Prize in 2020.
Einashe is also an Associate Trainer at the Global Center for Journalism and Trauma and serves on the editorial board of Tate Etc., the magazine of the Tate Galleries.