Ismail Einashe is an award-winning British-Somali journalist and writer. His reporting and essays have appeared in a wide range of international publications, including The Guardian, BBC News, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Sunday Times, NPR, El Mundo, Internazionale, 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 critical collection examining how migrants and refugees are represented in European media.
As a member of the cross-border investigative collective Lost in Europe, Einashe investigates the disappearance of child migrants. He is currently a 2025–2026 Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan, where he is researching how art can change the narrative around forced migration. His global reporting also includes a 2019 Alicia Patterson Fellowship, during which he documented China’s influence in Africa.
Einashe’s investigative work has received several major awards. In 2024, his work with Lost in Europe won the Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize for Journalism, awarded by the European Parliament, for revealing that over 50,000 unaccompanied child migrants disappeared across Europe between 2021 and 2023—an average of 47 children every day. His investigation into the disappearance of Vietnamese children from Dutch asylum shelters to Britain won the inaugural Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) Impact Award in 2021. Additionally, his three-year investigation into how a group of Bangladeshi shopkeepers took on the Cosa Nostra mafia in Sicily won a Migration Media Award in 2019 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.