Heidi Blake Books in Order

Heidi Blake is an English investigative journalist and author whose work sits at the point where deep reporting meets page-turning narrative. Born in Chatham, Kent, in April 1986, she has spent her career following corruption, hidden money, and the people who get hurt when powerful institutions decide not to look too closely.

She did not begin with a plan to write about oligarchs, poisoned exiles, or football bosses.

At the University of York, where she studied English and Politics, Blake edited the student paper Nouse. She has said that she first imagined a life in poetry or fiction, but student journalism gave her something harder to walk away from, real people, real stakes, and the thrill of finding out what was actually going on. Some of her early reported features focused on people on the margins, which already showed the mix of curiosity and empathy that would define her later work. In 2007, she won three national student media awards, including Student Journalist of the Year.

After graduating in 2008, she joined the Telegraph graduate scheme. Her training took her through local and national reporting, and she later moved into the paper's investigations team after working as a general news reporter. In 2011, she was recruited to the Sunday Times Insight team, a move that put her inside one of Britain's best-known investigative units and gave her room to work on the long, document-heavy stories that became her specialty.

Then the scale of the stories changed.

The Ugly Game, written with Jonathan Calvert, grew out of reporting on FIFA and Qatar's successful bid for the 2022 World Cup. Readers who come to this book usually like the same things Blake's journalism does well: it takes a huge, murky system and breaks it down into people, decisions, payments, and pressure. The book is not really about scores or tactics. It is about how influence travels, how reputations are protected, and how a global sport can be run by private deals behind closed doors.

Her second book, From Russia with Blood, moves into even darker territory. Drawing on reporting that built from a BuzzFeed News investigation, it examines the suspicious deaths of Russian exiles and insiders in Britain and beyond, and the reluctance of Western authorities to face what was happening. That investigation was a Pulitzer finalist and won the Tom Renner Award in 2018. Readers often remember Blake's work for this mix of qualities, careful reporting, geopolitical scale, and a strong sense that the people inside the story matter as much as the statecraft around them.

That mix carried into her years at BuzzFeed News, where she became UK investigations editor in 2015 and later global investigations editor. Her reporting there ranged from Russian assassinations to the failures of the guardianship system in the United States. In 2022, she joined The New Yorker as a contributing writer, and her later work has covered women in Dubai's ruling family, carbon-offset scams, and Andrew Tate's business empire. She has also moved into audio, helping adapt major investigations for In the Dark and hosting the series Blood Relatives.

A lot of Blake's work circles the same hard questions. What happens when wealth buys silence? Why do governments and companies ignore warning signs that are sitting in plain view? And what does justice look like for the people who do not have power, money, or a friendly institution behind them?

She is based in the U.K. now, still reporting across borders and across formats. Whether the subject is FIFA, the Kremlin, a royal household, or a broken legal system, Blake's readers tend to come for the access and the detail, then stay because she knows how to make complex investigations feel human.