Hot Shots 2024: Laila Edwy

At the age of 12, Laila Edwy knew she wanted to use journalism to amplify marginalised voices. Teargassed at a protest during Egypt’s 25 January Revolution in 2011, she was interviewed for The Times from Tahrir Square. She felt, she recalls, the privilege of having her voice heard.

Growing up between Cairo, Riyadh, Edinburgh and Cambridge, Edwy was picked for ITV’s Development Training scheme. Taking a placement at The Garden, she hit the ground running. Working on projects including a documentary series about fourth-wave feminism in Iran, India, Somalia, Afghanistan and Egypt, she demonstrated her creative thinking, tenacity and diverse skillset – not least when shooting, producing and editing a sizzle tape for a sustainable-cooking competition.

Picking up gigs on Studio Lambert’s Squid Game: The Challenge and Optomen’s Sort Your Life Out With Stacey Solomon, as well as a development researcher at Vice, Edwy returned to The Garden as a researcher on a series that perfectly fit her empathetic take on social history: BBC2’s Miners’ Strike: A Frontline Story.

And she’s sticking with the indie for a landmark series for a streamer. Series producer Elliott Swinburn hails Edwy’s “unwavering editorial support, bags of ingenuity and calmness”, adding: “Crafting a simple but compelling narrative is the biggest challenge for this series, and with vast amounts of information to catalogue and editorialise, in such a short period of time, I’ve been blown away by Laila’s methodical approach and her ability to sift for editorial gold.

“Laila is a rare all-rounder who is as comfortable in a development brainstorm as she is supporting a hundred-person crew on a shoot. I cannot wait to see how far she goes.”