Rana Ayyub is an Indian investigative journalist and a global opinions writer at The Washington Post. She has worked as a reporter, editor, and columnist with some of the leading publications in India and internationally. Her work has appeared in Time, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and Foreign Policy, and she has been featured on the cover of The New Yorker. Rana has reported extensively on majoritarian politics and violence, extrajudicial killings by the state, Islamophobia, and communalism. She is the author of the international bestseller Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover-Up.
Rana’s work focuses on the marginalized and the oppressed; she reports on and advocates for the fight against misinformation and the protection of democratic ideals. It is for this work that she has faced extreme forms of persecution by the Indian government, including multiple cases for which she is currently facing trial in India.
In a career spanning eighteen years, Rana has been awarded the Sanskriti Award for integrity and excellence in journalism by the former President of India. She received the Global Shining Light Award for investigative journalism in 2017 and was named the Most Resilient Global Journalist in 2018 at the Peace Palace in The Hague. In 2019, she was listed among ten global journalists facing the highest levels of threat to their lives. In 2018, the United Nations assigned six Special Rapporteurs to urge the Indian government to ensure her safety—an unprecedented intervention for an individual case in India. Her reporting consistently challenges power, interrogating state narratives and exposing the human cost of majoritarian politics. At a time of shrinking press freedoms, her work stands as both documentation and defiance.
In 2020, Rana was awarded the McGill Medal for journalistic courage. In 2021, she received the Award for Excellence in Journalism and International Human Rights from the University of Texas. In 2022, she won the Overseas Press Club Award for her incisive commentary on India and, in the same year, was honored with the John Aubuchon Press Freedom Award, the highest journalism honor from the National Press Club in the United States. In 2024, she was awarded the International Press Freedom Award by Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.
She lives in Mumbai with her family.