Caroline Mary Moorehead is a human rights journalist and biographer. Born in London, Moorehead is the daughter of Australian war correspondent Alan Moorehead and his English wife Lucy Milner. She received a B.A. from the University of London in 1965.
Moorehead has written six biographies, of Bertrand Russell, Heinrich Schliemann, Freya Stark, Iris Origo, Martha Gellhorn, and of Henriette-Lucy, Marquise de La Tour du Pin Gouvernet. Moorehead has also written a number of nonfiction pieces centered on human rights including a history of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Dunant’s Dream, based on previously unseen archives in Geneva, Troublesome People, a book on pacifists, and a work on terrorism, Hostages to Fortune. Her most recent work in this category is on refugees in the modern world named Human Cargo, published in 2004. Moorehead has also published A Train in Winter, a book which focuses on 230 French women of the Resistance who were sent to Auschwitz, and of whom only forty-nine survived. Her 2014 book Village of Secrets is on a similar theme, describing a story where a wartime French village helped 3,000 Jews to safety.
She has written many book reviews for assorted papers and reviews, including the TLS, Literary Review, Telegraph, Independent, Spectator, and New York Review of Books. She specialized in human rights as a journalist, contributing a column first to The Times and then the Independent, and co-producing and writing a series of programs on human rights for BBC television.
She is a trustee and director of Index on Censorship and a governor of the British Institute of Human Rights. She has served on the committees of the Royal Society of Literature, of which she is a Fellow; the Society of Authors; English PEN; and the London Library. She also helped start a legal advice centre for asylum seekers from the Horn of Africa in Cairo, where she helps run a number of educational projects.
She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1993. She was awarded an OBE in 2005 for services to literature.