Lyra McKee - Lost, Found, Remembered

Extracted from The Lost Boys author biography

I grew up in a conflict hotspot in North Belfast, off a road known as Murder Mile because of the number of people who were killed on it during the Troubles. The Cliftonville Road where I was born and reared is said to have had more casualties per square foot during the war than any other part of the country. Ive written extensively about the conflict because I know it so intimately. I witnessed its last years, as armed campaigns died and gave way to an uneasy tension we natives of Northern Ireland have named peace, and I lived with its legacy, watching friends and family members cope with the trauma of what they could not forget.

I dropped out of university aged nineteen. In 2006, I won the Sky News Young Journalist of the Year for a story looking at rising suicide rates in my native North Belfast. Ive been published in the Atlantic, BuzzFeed News, Mosaic Science, the Independent, and many other newspapers and magazines. In 2016, Forbes named me one of their 30 Under 30 best journalists in Europe. I have delivered newsroom training to journalists at newspapers including the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times. I have also worked for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, mentoring and overseeing investigations into financial corruption by Africa-based journalists.

I have spoken at events all over the world, including Techraking, a conference jointly organised by Google and the California Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), journalism.co.uks News Rewired event in London, the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, and TEDxStormont in Belfast. In 2014, Letter to My Fourteen-Year-Old Self, a story describing my experience of growing up as a gay person in Northern Ireland, went viral. It was later developed into the short film Letter, produced by Belfast-based production company Stay Beautiful films. It has since been screened at a US film festival.

I know very well how the Troubles masked other crimes; how women, children and vulnerable people were harmed because child abusers and killers and men who beat their wives dont stop doing what they do because theres a war on. In fact, they carry on because they can because a police force and judicial system distracted by a war tend to overlook ordinary criminals. And sometimes, they carry on because the war has turned them into a protected species like an IRA or UVF member who raped women but was too valuable to the organisation to be punished and who was secretly feeding information to the security services and was therefore too valuable an asset to them, too. Lots of awful things are done in the name of winning wars, but they are eventually reckoned with when the conflict ends and the families of the dead speak up about their loved ones.