Evan Williams has been a print, radio, and television journalist for 30 years, most recently specializing in international TV current affairs programs, documentaries, and investigations, usually in hostile environments.
Now working through his own London-based company, Evan Williams Productions, his team won a 2015 Emmy Television Award in the US for "Outstanding Investigative Journalism in a News Magazine" for the FRONTLINE film Hunting Boko Haram. The film investigates the Nigerian military's use of indiscriminate violence and systematic human rights abuses against innocent civilians in its campaign against the Islamist terror group Boko Haram.
The 48-minute UK version titled Nigeria's Hidden War, broadcast by the original commissioner Channel 4 TV, won the Broadcast Award for Best News and Current Affairs program in 2014 and was runner-up in the UK's Foreign Press Awards.
Evan Williams Productions recently won human rights and New York TV Festival Awards for two half-hour investigations made for Al Jazeera's "101 East" program. One was on the abuse of blasphemy laws in Pakistan, the other on the continuing security service persecution of ethnic Tamils and opposition political figures in northern Sri Lanka.
Evan has worked extensively as a Reporter/Producer for Channel 4's award-winning international current affairs strand "Unreported World," covering stories in Iraq, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, Central Asia, Egypt, Jamaica, Pakistan, Burma, India, and many others.
Evan's company provides documentaries and current affairs films for Channel 4 in the UK and FRONTLINE in the US.
In 2006, Evan spent six weeks inside Burma's jungles with guerrillas from the ethnic Karen National Union as they took emergency supplies deep inside the country to villages that had been attacked and burned out by Burma's army.
He then spent several weeks in the main part of the country, traveling undercover to meet underground dissidents and speak directly to those struggling against military dictatorship, including some just released from prison. That material premiered as a 45-minute documentary on Channel 4 in Britain and on PBS in the United States as Burma's Hidden War.
Before that, he was one of two senior staff reporters with the Australian ABC's flagship international current affairs program foreign correspondent, reporting in 25 to 45-minute stories from around the globe.
Some of the stories he covered during that period include: Saudi Arabia's Terror Funding Trail; Inside Islamic Jihad in South East Asia; British-occupied Basra through the British Army and local Shi'ite communities; Vietnam's Democratic Underground; Illegal Logging in Papua New Guinea; Libya's Coming in from the Cold; Angola's Diamond Wars; Torture and Renditions in Uzbekistan; Pakistan's Sectarian Conflicts; Burma's Drug Running Regime; Islamic Secession in Thailand's South; Mindanao's Moslem Insurgency; Bosnia's Rape Babies; Bosnia's Free War Criminals; Cambodia's Murderous Dictator; Catholic Sex Cover-up in Boston; The New War Against America; Malaysia's Political Assassination of Anwar Ibrahim; Indonesia's Military; Massacres in West Papua; Civil War in the Solomon Islands; Fiji's Coup.
Between 1992 and 1997, he was the Australian ABC's Bangkok-based South-East Asia correspondent covering more than ten countries through the region for Radio and Television News and Current Affairs.
In that time, he covered civil war in Burma; the UN's deployment to Cambodia; the release of Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma; the fall of Suharto in Indonesia, coups in Cambodia; the Muslim insurgency in the Philippines, among daily news from the region.
Evan has been a finalist for several Australian Walkley Awards, won commendations for TV interviews, and won several New York Festival TV Awards.
Evan started his career as a cadet reporter on the Hobart Mercury Daily Newspaper in Tasmania, Australia, in 1980, where he worked until 1983 before moving to Far North Queensland to help start a new regional newspaper and then for a year at The West Australian as a copy editor.
Evan spent a year traveling from Hong Kong to London, then two years working as a freelance journalist and sub-editor in London before returning to Australia. He got freelance work with ABC Radio in Hobart before moving to Sydney and joining ABC Radio full time. Within about 18 months, he was posted to Bangkok as the ABC's Southeast Asia correspondent, first for radio and then building it in a TV and Radio bureau.
