Born in Bury, Lancashire, Patricia graduated in German and French at Bristol University and was trained on the Bolton Evening News before joining Reuters news agency. After postings in Geneva, Bonn and Rome she became the Times correspondent in Germany and subsequently a leader-writer and assistant foreign news editor for that newspaper in London.
With many other journalists from the Times she moved in 1986 to the newly-founded Independent and returned to Germany where she covered the collapse of Communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall, switching to Warsaw in 1990 to report on the transition to democracy in countries from the Baltic to the Black Sea and subsequently to Rome to cover the “Tangentopoli” (“bribesville”) corruption scandals and the collapse of the discredited political regime.
In 1990 she was awarded the Anglo-German Foundation’s prize for journalism. She has also worked briefly for the Baltimore Sun, the Sunday Times and the UN World Food Programme. Patricia Clough has one daughter and lives in Italy.
