Home / Courtney Yusuf

About Me

Award-winning multimedia journalist and audio producer/ executive producer based in London.

I produce The Guardian's daily news and current affairs podcast Today In Focus, as well as the Cotton Capital series - an investigation into The Guardian's foundational links to the enslavement of African people and the contemporary legacies of Transatlantic slavery.

I was the Silver winner for Best News and Current Affairs Producer at the 2024 Audio Production Awards and am a judge on the 2025 Press Awards.
Today In Focus won best News and Current Affairs podcast at the British Podcast Awards 2023.
The Cotton Capital project won the 'Excellence in Diversity' award at the 2024 Press Awards and was highly commended at the British Journalism Awards 2023.
Episode 3 of Cotton Capital won a National Association of Black Journalists' Salute to Excellence Award 2024 for 'Best Podcast - Commentary & Discussion'.
I was nominated for Best News Producer at the 2021 Audio Production Awards and Best New Producer in 2020.

I have written for The Guardian, The Wire, Novara Media, Skin Deep, and others about culture, race, and urban space. For a sonic cruise around the Med, re-visit my show The Wine-Dark Sea on Noods Radio.

I am particularly interested in the dynamics and contemporary legacies of the British Empire so if you are too, get in touch!

Ta-Nehisi Coates on why stories matter in the age of Trump

“This is a cultural president. Make no mistake about it.”For Ta-Nehisi Coates, the award-winning writer and journalist, the US president, Donald Trump, and his allies clearly understand the power of story-telling in politics. Coates has recently written a new book, The Message, and he tells Michael Safi that the stories told in TV, films, literature and beyond are not a distraction from politics today but are actively shaping it.

Episode 3: The Sea Islands

Journalist DeNeen L Brown travels to the Sea Islands in the US and meets the Gullah Geechee people – direct descendants of enslaved Africans who picked the distinctive Sea Island cotton prized by traders in Manchester.

The Freedom theatre – and the fight for Palestinian culture

What does the raiding of a theatre in the West Bank tell us about the dangers Palestinian artists are facing? Emma Graham-Harrison reports

The fight to give Indigenous Australians a voice

As Australians prepare to vote in a referendum to give Indigenous people a voice in parliament, Prof Marcia Langton explores the long struggle for equal rights

Uncovering Black British history beyond London

When Guardian arts and culture correspondent Lanre Bakare was growing up, he learned the same Black British history as many of us did. It was a series of singular events: the docking of the Windrush in 1948, unrest in Notting Hill or Brixton, the murder of Stephen Lawrence. All important, but all firmly focused on the capital.Now Lanre has written a book about the Thatcher years, looking at the stories that are less often told: those that took place outside London.

The heroic Guardian reporter who documented the rise of the Nazis

Frederick Augustus Voigt was the Manchester Guardian’s Berlin correspondent between 1920 and 1932.In this episode, two fellow former Berlin correspondents, Helen Pidd and Philip Oltermann, discuss Voigt’s incredible reporting on the rise of Nazi Germany.“I think he saw that it was important not to give the Nazis the ‘both sides’ treatment,” Philip says. “And was really razor sharp when it came to focusing on the political violence that the Nazis were inflicting...

The Return of Babymother: A Celebration of Harlesden’s Reggae Roots

Widely considered to be the first Black British musical, Babymother follows Anita (Anjela Lauren Smith), who has an ambition to become a local Dancehall star. Courtney Yusuf meets Julian Henriques and Parminder Vir, director and producer, to retrace the film’s steps, over 20 years after its release.

#10 Courtney Yusuf by Telling Stories

Courtney is part of the team that bring you Today In Focus at The Guardian. He also produces The Wine-Dark Sea for Noods Radio, a sonic cruise around the Mediterranean where each episode explores a different musical genre and the world from which it came. Courtney is someone who thinks deeply about place - and what it means to really take a listener somewhere. We wanted to get to the bottom of how you can help the listener arrive at the authentic truth of a place. While, Courtney says, there is no real authentic truth, we can work to understand a story (and a place) by speaking to different people who share an authentic investment in it and by listening closely to the details they pick-up on. Content Warning: This episode contains reference to torture and violence against women.

A radical way to teach contested history

Parallel Histories is an educational charity that offers a new way of studying contested history. It helps students navigate the history of Israel and Palestine, the Northern Ireland conflict, Putin and Ukraine, and the impact of the British Empire, and take courses on those it calls “great” leaders, including Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher...

The volunteer fighter: ‘Life will never be the same’

Volodymyr Ksienich, 22, has returned to Ukraine to join the defence of Kyiv. He tells Michael Safi how his life changed forever after last week’s Russian invasion

Today In Focus: One hour to escape: the race to get out of a Gaza tower before an Israeli airstrike

A warning call told residents of al-Jalaa apartment block that their homes were about to be destroyed. This is the story of the frantic evacuation that followed – told through recordings made by the people who lived there

Today In Focus: How Jewish parents used Guardian ads to save their children’s lives

This month is 200 years since the Guardian was first established in Manchester. For the Guardian’s world affairs editor, Julian Borger, a part of that history is deeply personal. In 1938, there was a surge of classified ads in the Guardian as parents – including his grandparents – scrambled to get their children out of the Reich. What became of the families? On Wednesday 3 August 1938, a short advertisement appeared on the second page of the Manchester Guardian, under the title “Tuition”. “I s

Today In Focus: In conversation with Benjamin Zephaniah and George the Poet

Benjamin Zephaniah and George the Poet are two of Britain’s most successful contemporary poets. They discuss why, despite being born a generation apart, their work is still exposing racial injustice.

'Here, you fight for your life': how reggae brought hope to Naples

In the shadow of Vesuvius and under the blazing Mediterranean sun sits a labyrinth of cobbles, zipping scooters, shouting neighbours and stone buildings plastered with posters. Amid the streets of one of Europe’s most densely populated cities is one of its most vibrant reggae scenes, with 10 sound systems throwing bass-filled parties each week. “There is no hostility in the scene,” explains Brian D’Aquino of Bababoom Hi Fi Sound System. “We have all known each other for years, live with each other, let each other borrow amplifiers or whatever. Plus there’s no money, which probably helps.”

Speaking at the 2023 Freedom Festival, Hull, with Dr Cassandra Gooptar and Ebony Riddell Bamber

Speaking at the 2023 Newsrewired journalism conference on 'What gives news podcasts an edge?'

Speaking as part of the Frontline Club's 2021 screening of 'My Brother's Keeper' which follows the life of Mohamedou Ould Salahi, a former Guantanamo detainee