Alex Klaushofer is an author and journalist who has written extensively on social affairs, religion and politics in Britain and Middle East, before realising that this really just boils down to writing about people and places.

Born in London but raised in Gloucestershire, she studied English at Oxford University in the 1980s. Subsequently she did a PhD in continental philosophy at Essex and went into teaching – first in a secondary school and then as a lecturer in higher and further education.

But she soon felt the need to get out more. In 1998, an internship at the New Statesman and a summer teaching English in a Palestinian refugee camp set the course for a new career in journalism. Editorial jobs on public policy magazines followed, along with freelance contributions to publications including the Guardian and the Telegraph. She returned periodically to the Palestinian Territories and did a stint as Middle East communications manager for Christian Aid.

After a while, post-war Lebanon started to look like an attractively quiet place to research a book featuring the human stories of the Middle East. Paradise Divided explored the mix of social, political and religious forces that make up this complex country and led to appearances on BBC radio programmes such as From Our Own Correspondent and Excess Baggage.

Back home, she decided to explore a hidden side of her native land. Her second book, The Secret Life of God, is a kind of spiritual investigation into twenty-first century Britain which chronicles how, in a secular age, people are finding new ways of believing and belonging.

As a writer of the kind of narrative non-fiction that can take years to produce, Alex sometimes uses the midform – a publication shorter than a book but longer than an article – to publish essays on a wider range of subjects, including her experience with foxes. She is currently working on a full-length book examining Europe through the lens of its lesser-known cities. She lives in Lisbon. 

She writes regular essays about our changing times on Substack at Ways of Seeing.