Nick Davies has been named journalist of the year, reporter of the year and feature writer of the year because of his investigations of crime, drugs, poverty and other social problems. Hundreds of reporters in Britain, China, Germany India and South Africa, have attended his one-on-one master class in the skills of investigative work.

He has been a journalist since 1976, working as a freelancer and regularly as a special correspondent for the Guardian and the Observer. He has worked on television documentaries. Also, he has published books: White Lies, investigating a racist miscarriage of justice in Texas; Dark Heart, uncovering the scale and origins of UK poverty; Flat Earth News, which won the first Bristol Festival of Ideas book award. It is now being translated into Thai, Vietnamese, Greek, Slovenian, Ukrainian and Chinese.

He has won many awards, including the Martha Gellhorn award for investigative reporting as well as the awards for European Journalism. In November 2009, the University of Westminster made him an honorary fellow ‘for services to journalism’.

Davies has made documentaries for ITV's World in Action, also as a reporter for The Guardian, he was responsible for uncovering the News of the World phone hacking affair which made him one of the best-known people of British journalism. He claimed that the News of the World journalists hacked into private mobile phones to get ideas for their articles.