Anne Karpf
Anne Karpf examines health and ageing as social and political experiences rather than just clinical conditions. She is a sociologist and award-winning journalist who writes regularly for the Guardian on social, political and cultural questions, with a particular focus on health, ageing and their wider consequences.
Health, ageing and dementia
Karpf’s health coverage centres on how people live with illness and ageing day to day, and how society responds to them. In her feature on people with dementia who are determined to change perceptions, she focuses on their activism, agency and ordinary lives instead of reducing them to diagnosis and decline. Her journalism on ageing has been recognised alongside her book-length work on later life, and she treats ageing as a stage shaped by policy, care systems and cultural attitudes, not simply by biology. She tends to build her pieces around in-depth interviews, combining testimony from those directly affected with clear explanation of the systems and assumptions that frame their experiences.
Across her health writing, Karpf returns to the question of who gets to define illness and ageing. Her nonfiction on the reporting of health and illness explores how media narratives can distort or oversimplify conditions, and how that affects both patients and professionals. This concern with representation runs through her journalism: she challenges language that treats older people and those with dementia as burdens, and highlights the ways they organise, speak out and demand a different future for care. For communications around health, her reporting is distinctively interested in lived experience, stigma and the politics of services rather than in clinical detail alone.
Gender, environment and social justice
Karpf extends her health and ageing work into questions of gender and environmental justice. She has written books that connect women’s lives and caring roles with climate breakdown and ecological politics, and she uses that research to inform essays and talks on how communities can be revitalised in ways that work for both people and the planet. In this strand of her work, she often links the invisible labour of care with environmental harm, arguing that solutions to climate and local decline need to take account of who does unpaid work and who bears the health impacts.
Her public work on local communities and climate policy emphasises everyday experience over abstract targets. Karpf tends to draw out stories of neighbourhoods, carers and activists, showing how decisions on housing, transport and green space affect health and ageing as much as hospital policy does. She writes about social and cultural issues with the same attention to inequality and power that marks her health coverage, so climate, care and gender appear as interconnected themes rather than as separate beats.
Media, memory and psychological life
Karpf’s journalism and broadcasting also focus on memory, family and psychological life, and how these are shaped by media and culture. Her early nonfiction on health reporting examines how news outlets construct illness and medicine, while her later work continues to question the stories institutions tell about bodies and minds. She has presented radio programmes that revisit the legacy of child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and discuss contemporary parenting, reflecting her interest in how psychological ideas enter everyday family life. This strand of her work gives her health pieces a distinctive depth, drawing on social science and psychology as well as reportage.
She writes, too, about historical memory and its use in current conflicts, including reflections on Holocaust remembrance and how it is invoked in debates over Gaza. In these pieces she connects personal and collective memory, showing how narratives about trauma can be mobilised in ways that affect present-day policy, identity and safety. Taken together, her work across journalism, books and broadcasting forms a consistent approach: she pays close attention to how stories about health, ageing, gender and trauma are constructed, who is heard, and what those stories mean for people’s lives.
4 more health journalists.
Alex Storey
Alex Storey is a journalist at LBC whose work is driven by specific cases that test professional conduct and accountability in health and the public sector. He covers health as his main beat, focusing on the point where individual decisions by clinicians or officials meet public trust in institutions. His reporting is incident-first and case-led, using concrete episodes to show how rules, ethics and policy work in real life. Recent pieces include a disciplinary case where a nurse was struck off after linking a patient’s cancer to Covid jabs, and coverage of civil servants being “paid to play Grand Theft Auto” as “lived experience” training. Across these stories, he examines how professionals, regulators and officials explain their decisions, and what that reveals about trust, responsibility and the standards expected of people in positions of authority.
Alexandra Thompson
Alexandra Thompson is an assistant news editor focused on health who treats health claims as hypotheses to be tested rather than messages to be repeated. She works at New Scientist, combining editing with frontline reporting on ageing brains, cognitive health, chronic illness, contested treatments and infectious disease. Her beat centres on how neuroscience and psychology intersect with everyday health choices and on how scientific findings translate into real-world outcomes for people living with illness. She examines lifestyle advice, rehabilitation programmes and outbreak guidance against current evidence, clarifying risk without overstating it and giving space to controversy without sensationalising it. Alongside written news she appears in audio and video formats, bringing the same clear, news-driven approach to live discussions and helping shape the daily health agenda while keeping a tight focus on evidence and impact.
Alice Wilkinson
Alice Wilkinson investigates how everyday habits, products and routines shape sleep and long-term wellbeing, using test-driven health features to separate hype from real benefit. She holds a senior role on The Telegraph’s health features team, writing and shaping consumer-focused coverage that blends personal trial with clear expert evidence. Her core beat is sleep as a practical, solvable part of daily life, from detailed comparisons of magnesium supplements to service pieces on how sleeping position affects health over time. She treats supplements as a crowded, over-claimed market that demands careful testing and clear-eyed reporting. Alongside long-form features she writes weekly health desk dispatches on sleep, stress and concentration. Across her work she combines substantial self-testing, specialist insight and plain, unfussy prose to give readers measurable, realistic changes they can make.
Ally Head
Ally Head connects performance-focused fitness reporting with women’s health, sustainability and relationships, using her own endurance training and health history to stress-test trends against expert guidance. She is Senior Health, Sustainability and Relationships Editor at Marie Claire UK, where she shapes the health agenda across training, wellbeing and conscious living and writes and commissions news, topical features and SEO-led long-form pieces. A ten-time marathoner and Boston-qualifying runner, she focuses on structured, realistic training plans, strength and conditioning for women who run, and performance longevity. Her women’s health work centres on hormones, chronic conditions and fact versus fiction wellness claims. She also covers sustainability as conscious living and relationships, mental resilience and lifestyle features, favouring plain language, lived experience, specialist commentary and clear, repeatable routines. She has previously produced similar content for Women’s Health, Stylist, Glamour and Grazia.