European Young Leaders (#EYL40)

Myriam is an academic, broadcaster and writer specialising in issues related to Islam and the Middle East. She is a regular contributor to the Middle East Eye, the New Statesman and the Telegraph. In 2014, she broke a headline story on an exclusive 36-page document written by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al-Qaeda militant behind the 9/11 attacks. Since then, she presented two BBC documentaries, ‘The Muslim Pound’ (2016) and ‘A Deadly Warning: Srebrenica Revisited’ (2015) nominated for the Sandford St Martin religious programming award. Myriam is also a Research Associate at the Centre of Islamic Studies at SOAS University, where she focuses on British-Muslim integration issues. She recently completed her doctorate at Oxford University on the subject of Islamic political movements in Morocco.

Owen is an author, commentator and political activist. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian, having previously written for the Independent. He has made several television appearances on the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky News as well as on ITV’s Daybreak and BBC One’s ‘Question Time’. His work also appeared in several publications, including the Sunday Mirror and Le Monde diplomatique. In 2011, Owen published his first book, ‘Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class’, which received favourable critical reviews, including from the New York Times. He was named one of the top 50 Britons of the year by the Independent on Sunday in 2011 and was awarded the Young Writer of the Year prize at the Political Book Award in 2013.

Wouter is the founder of Newsmonkey.be, a social media tailor-made news website, partly funded by a successful crowd-funding action. In 2013, he made a documentary and book about the future of the news business: Stop The Presses: the Golden Age of Journalism starts now. The documentary was partly based on his experience as the Editor-in-Chief of De Morgen that he managed for over 2 years. Before that, he worked at De Standaard, as a political journalist, and won several Belfius-press prizes. During that period he acquired his passion for politics and the inner workings of the system, which resulted in a fiction series about Belgian politics that he co-wrote for television and that will air in Belgium. He holds an MA in Political Journalism from the Columbia School of Journalism in New York. He also has a Master in Business from the Vlerick Management School in Ghent and a Masters in Politics at Ghent University and Université de Bretagne Occidentale.