Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (née Damji; born 10 December 1949) is a British journalist and author, who describes herself as "a leftie liberal, anti-racist, feminist, Muslim...person". A regular columnist for the i newspaper and the Evening Standard, she is a well-known commentator on immigration, diversity, and multiculturalism issues. She is a founding member of British Muslims for Secular Democracy. She is also a patron of the SI Leeds Literary Prize. Early life and family Yasmin Damji was born in 1949 into the Indian community in Kampala. Her family belonged to the Nizari Ismaili branch of the Shia Islamic faith, and she regards herself as a Shia Muslim. Her mother was born in East Africa and her father moved there from British India in the 1920s. After graduating in English literature from Makerere University in 1972, Alibhai-Brown left Uganda for Britain, along with her niece, Farah Damji, shortly before the expulsion of Ugandan Asians by Idi Amin, and completed a Master of Philosophy degree in literature at Linacre College, University of Oxford, in 1975. After working as a teacher, particularly with immigrants and refugees, she moved into journalism in her mid-thirties. She is married to Colin Brown, former chairman of the Consumer Services Panel of the Financial Services Authority. The couple have a daughter, and Alibhai-Brown has a son from a previous marriage. Career and views A journalist on the New Statesman magazine in the early 1980s, Alibhai-Brown contributes a weekly column to The Independent. She has also written for The Guardian, The Observer, The New York Times, Time magazine, Newsweek, and the Daily Mail, and has appeared on the current affairs TV shows Dateline London and The Wright Stuff. Alibhai-Brown has won awards for her journalism, including Media Personality of the Year in 2000 (awarded by the Ethnic Multicultural Media Academy (EMMA)), the George Orwell Prize for Political Journalism in 2002, and the EMMA Award for Journalism in 2004. Alibhai-Brown was a research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a think tank associated with New Labour, from 1996 to 2001. She ended her connection with the Labour Party over the 2003 war in Iraq and other issues, and supported the Liberal Democrats in the 2005 and 2010 general elections. She is senior research associate at the Foreign Policy Centre, an honorary fellow at Liverpool John Moores University, and honorary visiting professor at Cardiff and Lincoln Universities. In the New