Writing

Anthony Summers

Anthony Bruce Summers (born 21 December 1942) is an Irish author. He is a Pulitzer Prize Finalist and has written ten non-fiction books. He worked for the BBC in current affairs coverage as a producer and then as an assistant editor of the long-running investigative documentary series Panorama. His first book was published in 1976. Summers is an Irish citizen who has been working with Robbyn Swan for more than thirty years before she became his co-author and fourth wife. After studying modern languages at Oxford University, he began work in laboring jobs, later progressing to freelance reporting for London newspapers. He later worked at Granada TV's World in Action, the UK's first tabloid public affairs program, and following that he wrote the news for the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation's Overseas Service. Later, he went back to England to BBC's Television News and then the BBC's 24 Hours, a late evening current affairs show that brought viewers international coverage of events. Summers became the BBC's youngest Producer at 24, travelling worldwide and sending filmed reports from the United States, across Central and Latin America, and the conflicts in Vietnam, the Middle East, and Africa. A main focus, though, was on the momentous events of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States – such as on-the-spot reports, during 1968, on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and on Robert F. Kennedy's bid for the presidency. He smuggled cameras into the then Soviet Union to obtain the only TV interview with dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov – when he was under house arrest, having just won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize.