Draft:Maddison Connaughton

Maddison Connaughton is an Australian journalist and newspaper editor.

Career
Connaughton’s career began in 2016 at Vice, where she served as features editor. She was twice nominated for the Walkley Award for Young Australian of the Year for her reporting on policing, the courts and the Syrian War.

In 2018, she travelled to the Lebanon-Syria border, where she interviewed Syrian teenagers who’d fled the war for the documentary Seven Years of Syria.

Also in 2018, Connaughton was appointed editor of The Saturday Paper, becoming one of the youngest people to ever edit an Australian national newspaper. As editor of The Saturday Paper, Connaughton was a judge for the Horne Prize, Australia’s richest prize for longform non-fiction, alongside writers Tara June Winch, Nam Le, Marcia Langton and Anna Krien.

In 2019, she was selected as an inaugural Walkley Foundation Our Watch Fellow.

She was a judge for the 2022 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. From 2022-2023, she was a judge and mentor for the Judith Neilson Institute’s Long Lede prize. The winning stories were published by Penguin Random House in the anthology Stories that Want to Be Told.

As a journalist, Connaughton has contributed to The Guardian, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and Good Weekend. Since 2023, she has worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as a journalist across its investigative programs Four Corners and Background Briefing.

Personal life
She is a first cousin of Canadian Olympic sprinter Jared Connaughton.