William Wintercross Keynote Speaker

Will Wintercross has spent most of his career working overseas as a foreign correspondent and producer. He has extensive experience covering major stories from wars to Ebola to natural disasters around the world. He uses his broad understanding of geo-politics and international affairs to advise multinational institutions  as they navigate the very complex world we live in.

He speaks authoritatively about geo-politics, with a focus on EMEA including Russia and the US, and Western foreign policy. By honing and tailoring his speeches to his audience, he ensures they relate as closely as possible to what he is talking about. He also speaks about his colourful and varied life as a foreign correspondent on the frontlines.

As a producer and on-air correspondent, Will has done recent projects for PBS NewsHour and CNN. Prior to that, his work appeared on PBS/FRONTLINE, The Telegraph, BBC, Sky News, and many other outlets. He is a Pulitzer grantee and has lectured for them at their request in the US.

His breadth of first hand experience on the ground has led to him to providing consultancy for a range of institutions and firms with pan-global interests. He is adept at explaining the link between seemingly unrelated global events and what they mean for people in the capitals of the West and how despite the West’s partially diminished dominance over global affairs, we still have a major role to play.

Will launched his career in 2001, aged 19, when he began reporting for The Ngami Times, a weekly newspaper in Botswana. In 2002, he stayed in and documented life in Romanian sanatoriums, an experience he found harrowing but immensely eye opening. In 2003 he worked along side Médecins Sans Frontières in Angola as they helped civilians displaced and injured by the civil war. Between 2007 and 2016 Will worked on assignment for The Daily Telegraph covering foreign affairs as a photo and video journalist and has shot and directed documentary shorts.

Reporting from conflict zones is central to Will’s work. He has documented the human toll of multiple wars across the Middle East and made multiple trips to West Africa and Democratic Republic of Congo during their various Ebola outbreaks. Most recently, he covered the fallout of the war in Ukraine.

Inspired by his work in Syria and witnessing first-hand the suffering of the civilian population, Will co-founded the Syrian Refugee Relief Fund, a charity which he co-runs pro bono, which has now raised over $1 million to assist orphans and help children who have lost limbs, as well as running a school for 802 children in eastern Syria.