Zoë Beaty

When it comes to exciting young national features journalists, Zoe Beaty is hard to beat. While our industry is now crammed with London-centric writers, Zoe’s background in local reporting from a tough Northern beat means that her work as Special Correspondent for The Independent often tells important stories about the UK that are regularly ignored by her peers.

Take, for instance, this fantastic piece of colour writing from Teesside Magistrates’ Court, where she trained as a cub reporter more than a decade ago. Returning to report on the sentencing of rioters after violence erupted across the country on July 29, her piece reads like a state-of-the-nation dispatch that those in Westminster would do well to take note of.

Similarly, her brilliantly evocative reportage from Farageland—her hometown of Boston, which saw significant wins after the election—serves as a stark warning to any politician relying on support from the ‘red wall’.

But she is equally capable of turning her sights to those in positions of power and responsibility. When gold medallist Charlotte Dujardin withdrew from the Paris Games after a video emerged of her repeatedly whipping a horse, the welfare of animals in equestrian competition became a major topic of conversation. Zoe took a closer look at the training methods behind stable doors and spoke to those calling for change. Her piece on the dark side of dressage was one of our most-read articles this summer.

Meanwhile, her interview with a victim of former PC Phil Hunter, who was from the same unit as Wayne Couzens, was widely praised by rape crisis groups campaigning to expose the predatory behaviour of those whose job it is to keep us safe.

Zoe’s audience numbers speak for themselves. In the past year, since Zoe joined The Independent full-time, she has driven the highest volume of new subscriptions directly and has the best conversion rate of any of our writers—nearly 5% of all new subscriptions and 6% of registrations are linked directly to just one of her articles in July. As a dedicated Premium feature writer, Zoe’s brilliant long-form feature writing has contributed to the enormous success of our premium proposition, which in 12 months has seen article views increase by 91% and subscriptions by 112%.

Her uncanny ability to tap into the zeitgeist and bring it to life through razor-sharp writing on the issues that truly matter to her audience is why Zoe Beaty would make a worthy winner of this year’s Feature Writer of the Year.