Tim Marshall was born on May 1, 1959, in England and was educated at Prince Henry’s Grammar School in Otley, close to Leeds, West Yorkshire. After a brief and unsuccessful career as a painter and decorator, Marshall entered the field of journalism through an unconventional route. He worked his way up in news reporting and presenting, starting with nightshift work and unpaid stints as a researcher and runner before becoming a correspondent.
Marshall has had a distinguished career as a diplomatic editor and foreign correspondent for Sky News. Over the course of thirty years, he has reported from Europe, the USA, Asia, and the Middle East. Marshall was based in Jerusalem as the Middle East Correspondent for Sky News, where he covered conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. He has also reported from war-torn regions such as Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Marshall was one of the few western journalists who remained in Belgrade during the NATO bombing raids in 1999 and was present to greet NATO troops when they advanced into Pristina.
Marshall has written for several national newspapers, including The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and The Sunday Times. His first book, "Shadowplay: The Overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic," was a bestseller in former Yugoslavia and is highly regarded as an account of that period. In 2014, he published a second book, "Dirty Northern B*st*rds!" and Other Tales from the Terraces: The Story of Britain’s Football Chants, which received widespread acclaim. His third book, "Prisoners of Geography," has been published in several countries, including the UK, USA, Germany, Japan, Turkey, and Taiwan. Marshall's latest book is "Worth Dying For. The Power and Politics of Flags," and a paperback version is due out in the spring of this year.
Throughout his career, Marshall has had several dangerous encounters, including being shot with bird pellets in Cairo, hit over the head with a plank of wood in London, bruised by the police in Tehran, arrested by Serbian intelligence, detained in Damascus, declared persona non grata in Croatia, bombed by the RAF in Belgrade, and tear-gassed all over the world. Despite these experiences, Marshall claims that none of them compares to the experience of watching his beloved Leeds United play away at Millwall FC in London.