Alex Hannaford

Writer

U.S.

Alex Hannaford

Writer

U.S.

Featured
A Man Was Murdered Here
Searching for clues to the life and death of William Greer.
Texas Observer
Featured
A prophet rises from the ashes of Waco
Charles Pace is the leader of the Branch Davidians, the religious sect in Texas that became infamous when a 51-day standoff with the FBI resulted in more than 80 deaths. Twenty years later, he is preparing his flock for conflict on a different scale.
Sunday Times magazine
Featured
Alcatraz of the Rockies
The world’s most notorious terrorists — the Unabomber, the shoe bomber, soon to be joined by the underwear bomber — live side by side in America’s toughest prison. Yet they never meet. Alex Hannaford investigates life at Colorado’s supermaximum security jail
Sunday Times magazine
Featured
Destitution North of the Border
CORPUS CHRISTI, Tex. -- The sun is low in the sky and an icy wind whips across the cotton field. The trailer has been empty a couple of months now. A tortured strip of aluminum bent into a 'V' sits like a spire on what's left of the roof, and the back end of the home is now a wooden skeleton after a tornado ripped it apart late last year.
The Atlantic
Featured
The cult of the man they call Messiah
This solitary 17-year-old girl was at the centre of a sexual molestation case involving the leader of a dangerous cult, who is 68. But she can’t wait to turn 18 so that she can go back to him and his ‘ministry’. Alex Hannaford on the church of The Lord Our Righteousness.
Sunday Times magazine
The feuding family that inspired "Dallas"
Just a few miles north-east of downtown Dallas is a 1000-acre lake known as White Rock, surrounded by large and expensive houses. But the priciest of them all is Mt Vernon, a magnificent white-pillared colonial mansion whose manicured lawn trails off towards the water. It was built in the Thirties by a man called Haroldson Lafayette Hunt, known as HL. A gambler-turned-oil-prospector, Hunt was asked in his eighties by a TV interviewer whether he really earned a million dollars a week. “I would starve to death with an income of a million dollars a week,” he replied.
Telegraph
Dead Man Talking Podcast
Angel Resendiz aka The Railroad Killer criss-crossed the US by freight train in the 80s and 90s, choosing his victims at random, before he was executed by the State of Texas in 2006. Before his death, Resendiz spoke to journalist Alex Hannaford and claimed, on tape, to have killed more than he had taken the blame for.
Apple Podcasts
‘Refugees Are Victims of the Very Thing You Are Afraid Of’
Despite an uncertain welcome in Texas, these Syrian families are trying to rebuild their lives after fleeing civil unrest and violence half a world away. The tapestry that hangs on the wall above the sofa in Iyad and Lina Al Afandi’s modest home just north of Dallas is the only physical reminder of the country they’ve left behind: a stitching that depicts a traditional Syrian house with tiled courtyard and fountain, and rugs draped from the balcony.
Texas Observer
Mantra with a Mission
Om or Ominous? The maverick film director David Lynch wants to bring Transcendental Meditation to our classrooms, and believes in yogic flying. Can he get it off the ground?
Sunday Times magazine
Café turning ex-soldiers into peace activists
It's 4.30pm on a quiet backstreet of Killeen, Texas. Above the hum of rush-hour traffic you can hear a solitary bugle playing Retreat from a nearby army base. It’s something that happens at the same time every day in this town, home to 40,000 soldiers. Fort Hood is one of the largest military posts in the world, with more of its troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan than any other in the United States. The bugle, which blares from speakers positioned all over this vast complex, coincides with the US flag being slowly lowered, signalling the end of the day. For some, that sound can’t come fast enough.
Telegraph
Life and Art in the “Slums” of Bariga
As you enter the on-ramp to Third Mainland Bridge (the second longest road bridge in Africa) from Oworonshoki and begin the 7.3-mile journey south over Lagos Lagoon toward Lagos Island, look to the right and you’ll see houses built on stilts, beyond which
Strangers Guide
America's Largest Cash Heist
The real motive behind America's biggest cash robbery — out now in British GQ
Rodney Reed’s brother on the death row case dividing America
You can hear the rally before you see it; the sound of shouting in unison, several blocks away, echoing around the centre of this sleepy Texas town nestled in the piney woods half an hour east of Austin, the state capital. When the 50-something-strong crowd emerges, heading towards the county district attorney’s office, everyone is braced against the cold.
GQ
The tiger next door: America’s backyard big cats
It was the sort of headline impossible to scroll past: “Pot Smokers Find Caged Tiger in Abandoned Houston House, Weren’t Hallucinating: Police.”. Last February, a group of people had snuck into a deserted house in Texas’s largest city to smoke marijuana when they stumbled upon a full-grown tiger in a cage – a cage secured by just a nylon strap and a screwdriver.
The Guardian
What Happened to the Mob
Anthony Arillotta swapped out his black Ford Expedition SUV for his mother’s Nissan Maxima – less conspicuous, he thought – then started out on the two-hour journey to New York City. It was 11 August, early in the morning, but the sun was shining and it was already warm. He’d been instructed to meet at a restaurant called Nebraska Steakhouse near Arthur Avenue, better known as Little Italy, in the heart of the Bronx.
GQ magazine
My Journey Along the Wall
It was a central plank of his election campaign: to build “a big, fat, beautiful wall” 1,000 miles long to combat illegal migration from Mexico. Now, as a caravan of thousands of asylum-seekers approaches, Alex Hannaford travels coast to coast to find out about life on this vast porous border
Sunday Times magazine

About

Alex Hannaford

Alex was born in London in 1974 and spent his early childhood in Nigeria. He cut his teeth in journalism on the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong and newspapers on the south coast of England before joining London's Evening Standard as a feature writer and later commissioning editor.

Alex has taught journalism at Kingston University in the UK and since moving to the US in 2003 has written about the death penalty, crime, harsh sentencing, religion, culture and human rights issues for British GQ, The Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph magazines, the Guardian, Esquire, The Atlantic, The Nation, and others.

In 2012 he wrote and directed The Last 40 Miles, an award-winning animated short film about the death penalty; in 2019-2020 he hosted Dead Man Talking, a podcast series for Audioboom which won silver at the 2019 British Podcast Awards and reached #1 in the UK iTunes podcast charts.

He won the 2015 Media Award from the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and is a Fellow of The Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma at Columbia University.

A dual British-U.S. citizen, Alex is based in New York's Hudson Valley. His latest podcast is "The Innocents," about wrongful conviction. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Stranger's Guide magazine, and is currently working on a book about Austin, Texas, to be published by Dey Street / Harper Collins in 2024.

Literary agent: Howard Yoon @ WME
TV / film: Nate Miller @ Management