Gwen Lister

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Gwen Lister

Gwen Lister was born on 5 December 1953 in East London, South Africa and is the founding editor of the English daily newspaper – The Namibian. She moved to Namibia from South Africa in the mid 1970s when she started work as a journalist at the Windhoek Advertiser. In 1978 Lister and Hannes Smith who had both left the Windhoek Advertiser because of interference in the paper’s political coverage, started the Windhoek Observer, a weekly newspaper.

In May 1984, the South African authorities banned the Windhoek Observer, primarily due to its political reporting and coverage of Swapo. Even though the ban on the Windhoek Observer was overturned in court, the paper’s management demoted Gwen Lister. She started raising funds to start The Namibian, a popular daily newspaper in Namibia to date. The Namibian Newspaper actively promoted the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 435.

In 1991 Lister was one of the founding members of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (Misa), which fosters the free and independent media in the region. She was also a member of the Unesco Press Freedom Committee.

Gwen Lister was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in the United States of America in 1995. She has received a number of international honours nationally and internationally. Lister has a BA (Ethics, Political Philosophy and History), University of Cape Town.

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