Francesca Maria Lorenzini

Laura Silvia Battaglia is an Italian journalist covering the Middle East (what she and other colleagues prefer to call South West Asia) and a specialist on Yemen, where she lived for years after the Arab uprisings.

It’s a place that shaped not just her career, but her personal life too. While there, she became part of a Yemeni family, which gave her rare access to stories and a much deeper understanding of how culture and society actually work.

In our conversation, we talk about what it means to be “half foreign and half local” as a journalist, why there are so few female Yemeni journalists, and the biggest mistakes Western reporters tend to make when covering the region.