Our 2026 Young Scot Wallace Award will be awarded to Award winning author and journalist Jen Stout for her powerful journalistic voice with a special focus on the people of Ukraine. We are especially delighted to share her work, Night Train to Odesa, in which she reported on the Russian Ukrainian war from Ukraine.
We are so honored to be sharing this important work from a Young Scot who continues to be doing so much.
Learn more about Jen’s background here:
Jen Stout is an award-winning Scottish journalist and author who writes for major outlets including Prospect magazine, London Review of Books, The Sunday Times and The Observer.
She has been covering the war in Ukraine since the full-scale invasion in 2022, and speaks Russian and basic Ukrainian. She started as a reporter for a local paper in southwest Scotland in 2017 after journalism training at college in Liverpool, and went on to work in TV news at BBC Scotland, had a brief stint in Leipzig on exchange, and then was a reporter and radio producer at BBC Radio Shetland.
2021 she left the BBC to take up a fellowship in Moscow, and spent a winter there, leaving Russia a few days after the February 24th 2022 invasion. She went straight to the Romanian border on the Danube and covered the refugee crisis, then crossed into Ukraine and began reporting on the war from all around the country. Her first book is an account of this time – Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Cost of Russia’s War was published in 2024 and was serialised on BBC Radio 4 as ‘Book of the Week’. It won the Highland Book Prize and the Saltire First Book award, and was shortlisted for the Sherborne Prize for Travel Writing and the RSL Ondaatje award. In 2026 she was made an honorary fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society.
Since its publication Jen has given around 70 talks, both in the UK and on a US tour (some talks are online, like St Andrew’s in London, Cove & Kilcreggan, and the Atlantic Council’s D.C. book launch). She regularly chairs book festival talks, film screening Q&As, and other events on journalism, Ukraine and Russia, and has taught writing/reporting workshops in Prague and at Moniack Mhor in the Scottish Highlands. In 2025 she gave the annual Sanctuary Lecture at St Andrew’s University.
She is a regular contributor to Prospect magazine, London Review of Books, and The Sunday Post. In the summer of 2026 she reported from Kyiv and Kharkiv, both pieces illustrated with her photography, and her report on frontline drone warfare was featured on the front page of The Observer. Other Ukraine dispatches include winter in Kyiv for the LRB, besieged Kherson for The Sunday Post, life-saving innovation for frontline medics for The Sunday Times, embedding with deminers and the bigger picture of landmine treaties falling apart for Prospect, ‘Pirate’ radio on the frontline for New European, the wartime symbolism of Kharkiv’s 1920s constructivist architecture for Prospect, the realities of war for children in Kyiv and Kharkiv for The Sunday Post, a profile of the photographer Gera Artemova for the Royal Photographic Society Journal, the role of writers in wartime for The Author Magazine, an essay remembering Victoria Amelinafor the New European, a dispatch from Kramatorsk for the LRB, an essay on the thorny topic of language and de-russification for Prospect, evacuations from frontline Siversk for The Sunday Post, a long reported feature on the killing of a poet for New Humanist (shortlisted for the Foreign Press Association awards), an obituary of Vladislava Chernykh who I’d photographed on the frontline, medics near Kurakhove (now obliterated and occupied) for The Sunday Post, a day with the young drone operatorsof Khartiia; remains of a village occupied by Russians; the ‘patchwork resistance’ of the early days of war in Kharkiv for New Internationalist; deportations from an occupied village (shortlisted for Amnesty Media Awards); politics, Pride, and uneasy wartime alliances in shattered Kharkiv for the LRB; opinion piece on the war and a rebuttal of the ‘Nato started it’ argument – here – and much reporting from the Romanian side of the border in early 2022, such as this piece for the LRB.
Throughout this time Jen was frequently reporting live and filing radio packages and features for BBC Radio Scotland, From Our Own Correspondent (like this one), RTE in Ireland, and BBC World Service. She was a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questionsand has appeared on many podcasts, including ‘Ukraine: The Latest‘ several times, War Tribe, BBC Radio’s Saturday Live, Brian Whitmore’s The Power Vertical, Nataliya Gumenyuk’s When Everything Matters, UkraineWorld with Volodymyr Yermolenko, the American-Scottish Foundation, Byline Times TV (video), Radicalized (video), Shetland Voices (on childhood and Shetland background), Silicon Curtain (video), Foreign Press Association USA (video), Rick the Ukrainian, Strategy Aaron (video), and the Prospect Podcast.