Guy
Hedgecoe

Print and broadcast journalist

Behind Spain’s news

About

Guy Hedgecoe is a freelance print and broadcast journalist who has been based in Madrid since 2003. He covers Spain for the BBC, The Irish Times, and Politico. His work has also appeared in or been broadcast by The New Republic, Deutsche Welle, Global Post, Foreign Policy, The Telegraph, The Miami Herald, Al Jazeera and Rté.

A Spanish and Portuguese speaker, he started out as a journalist in Ecuador, where he covered the country’s foreign debt default, 2000 coup d’état and dollarisation for CNN, The Financial Times, The Miami Herald and Bridge News. He also covered Peru, reporting from Lima when President Alberto Fujimori unleashed a political crisis by fleeing the country.

In Spain, he was editor-in-chief of El País newspaper’s English edition and founding editor of Spanish news website Iberosphere. In 2015, he published the essay Freezing Franco: The Battle for Spain’s Memory, looking at the country’s complex relationship with its recent past and in 2016 he published Skin Against Stone: Spain’s Basque Labyrinth, an examination of the Basque Country’s four decades of separatist violence and its aftermath.

Guy has close emotional ties with Madrid – his maternal grandparents met there during the civil war and his mother was born in the city.

Guy writes news, analysis and features and he also does radio and TV packages as well as live broadcasting. For more about his work, see here.

Blog

Lengua

Jun 18, 2024 |

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.” –George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’. He’s back. Spain’s former prime minister,...

No Country for Old Uncertainties

Jul 22, 2023 |

“In the Spaniard’s heart is a great yearning for freedom, but only his own. A great love of truth and honor in all its forms, but not in its substance.” Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses I stumbled upon this quote recently as the tributes poured in for Cormac...

Recent work

Vinicius Jr case opens wider racism debate

May 23, 2023

May 23rd, 2023. Published by BBC Online Insults aimed at Real Madrid soccer player Vinicius Jr have triggered a fierce debate about racism in sport and whether Spanish society has a problem with the issue. Spanish police have arrested three people in connection with...