Lyse Doucet is Irish – “but only a little Irish”, she says. Her mother’s maiden name is Hussey, “of the Husseys from around Dublin”, which is enough to secure her a spot in the extended diaspora. The veteran broadcaster grew up in New Brunswick, on Canada’s Atlantic coast, where waves of Irish and Scottish settlers over centuries have left their mark. Aspects of the culture she experiences on trips to Ireland – she highlights the serving of cake in particular – give her an echo of home.
The BBC’s chief international correspondent has had to find home comforts in many very inhospitable places around the world in her time, from warzones to flood-wrecked coasts. She has reported from around the world since 1983, and as a senior presenter for the BBC since 1999, covering pretty much every major conflict and global news event you can think of.
The other part of her heritage, accounting for a name more French than most on the BBC’s Six O’Clock news, is Acadian, descended from fiercely independent 17th and 18th century Francophone settlers of Canada’s maritime provinces. She is one of a generation of female foreign correspondents, along with the likes of Channel 4’s Lindsey Hilsum, her “professional twin”, who have built their careers reporting on the upheaval of the past four decades, and now represent some of the most senior and respected journalists in the world.
“I’m often confused with Orla Guerin, who is of course 100 per cent Irish,” she says of her BBC colleague who covers a similar beat.
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Doucet speaks to The Irish Times in front of a backdrop familiar to those who follow her analysis on television: her home office in London, where she is based in between trips across the world. This past summer alone, she has reported from Egypt, on the Gaza border, and Tehran in the aftermath of Israel’s bombing campaign.
Access to Gaza for overseas journalists has been restricted for the duration of the conflict, and while Doucet says Palestinian journalists have been doing work that is “nothing less than heroic” in an unprecedently dangerous environment, the lack of outside witness has created problems with the information environment.
“That’s one of these paradoxes: never have we had so much information. The war is actually being livestreamed in real time. But equally we have never had so much misinformation and disinformation about what is actually happening in Gaza.
“It really is a war of our time. War crimes on an industrial scale, violations of the rules of war, international humanitarian law, the killing of children, the taking of hostages, starvation as a weapon of war. I mean, it’s all there. It’s all there and we can only watch it from afar.”
The past few years have not offered much time to sit back, with global news stories coming thick and fast.
When I was starting out and working particularly in war zones, they used to say that a white western woman was a third gender in some societies
— Lyse Doucet
“In my day job I can miss small stories, but not big stories,” she says. This arrangement posed her some difficulties when she sat down to write a book.
“Ever since I signed my contract, there’s been a major story. In 2020/21, it was the fall of Kabul to the Taliban; 2022 was the full-scale Russian invasion [of Ukraine]; 2023 was the Gaza war; 2024 was Sudan. So it’s taken a while.”
The result is The Finest Hotel in Kabul, a work of narrative non-fiction that tells the story of Afghanistan from the vantage point of the city’s Intercontinental hotel: once-luxurious, later beleaguered, but still standing despite finding itself at the centre of a series of coups, revolutions, civil wars and foreign invasions.
Subtitled A People’s History of Afghanistan, it presents a view of the central Asian country’s rocky history through the eyes of the various staff at the hotel – from the older woman cook whose dumplings beguile guests to the young man who is saving up to study engineering.
Doucet’s big break in journalism came in 1988 when she reported on the fall of Kabul – one of several in recent decades – to the mujahideen after the Soviet withdrawal. She stayed in the Intercontinental then, reporting to the world from a country that had few telephones, and has been back often, following the twists and turns in the country’s story.
The book’s timeline begins in the 1960s under the modernising king, Zahir Shah, a period when Afghanistan was producing wine and Balmain ran a fashion show in the Intercontinental, though for the vast majority of people, development was slow. It runs through: constitutional monarchy; a military coup; a further coup to align with the Soviets; the invasion of the Soviets; the mujahideen rising; the withdrawal of the Soviets; the victory of the mujahideen; the rise of the Taliban; 9/11; the US invasion of Afghanistan; tentative democracy; the US withdrawal and finally, the rise of the Taliban again.
“First of all, I had to get the history of Afghanistan right,” she said. “Then I had to get the history of the hotel right, and see where they intersect, and where the best stories are – stories that tell you something which is really crucial in that particular period of war.
“Then I had to get the characters and their history. And I’m not a waitress – I worked in a restaurant for a long time, but it was a long time ago. I had to figure out how you do waitress things. What they do while they’re waiting, what they observe. I had to read about housekeepers, cooks, I had to learn the grammar of that too.”
In telling the story of Afghanistan through the perspective of ordinary Afghans, she had to be careful to be authentic, working with an Afghan colleague to check culturally specific language and customs. “Things like Afghan expressions,” she says. “They’re very pious – being an Irishman, you can relate to that.”
As a result of her decision to keep the focus on one building in a large and complex nation, she can capture feelings that would be missing from more conventional histories of the war-torn nation. As the mujahideen advance on Kabul, the hotel’s staff and guests feel it first through rumour, then through kitchen shortages. Then the sounds of shells and gunfire begin to be heard in the periphery of the capital – and later a rocket shatters the window of the Intercon itself, another scuff on its fast-fading glamour. At one point, the Taliban wind up running the hotel and putting up many of their leaders and allies – including, Doucet notes, a tall Saudi named Osama bin Laden.
Through the seemingly endless political earthquakes, dinner orders are taken and sheets are changed by staff. Drinks orders are taken too, sometimes, though whether alcohol is available depends on the government of the day.
“In every period since 1988, 1989 when I was first in the hotel, the Afghans would come up to me − because they always think foreigners know more,” Doucet says. “They’d ask, ‘do you think it’s going to get better?’ And it just pains me to think that. Because little did we know that not only would it not get better, but it would get a lot worse.”
The Finest Hotel in Kabul depicts hard times, but it has a note of hope and optimism nonetheless, because its everyday characters impress with their resilience and ingenuity.
“I think what I wanted to show was that in between what we see on our screens in war − the people running away from bombs and bullets, the wailing and the crying, the houses blasted by bombs … in the spaces in between, life goes on and people find this everyday courage to carry on.”
Doucet, who features only lightly and in the third person in the book, has managed to build relationships with many important figures in the country, beginning with later-president Hamid Karzai, whom she first met in Pakistan in the 1980s. And being an outsider is sometimes a benefit.
“When I was starting out and working particularly in war zones, they used to say that a white western woman was a third gender in some societies,” she says. “They weren’t sure what to make of you. They didn’t treat you like the women of their society, but they didn’t treat you like the men.
“But you got special privileges because they felt in some ways that you had to be protected. Which translated to getting the front seat on the plane.”
Doucet, at 66, is writing in the gaps between the big stories she cannot miss at the BBC. Has she given any thought to what it might feel like to finally let those stories go?
She pauses for a moment.
“You know, we call it the pang, and it’s physical,” she says. “It’s that feeling where something happens in places where they’re not just stories.
“They’re as much a part of your personal life as they are your professional life.
“You feel it right here,” she says, illustrating the feeling with a hand to her chest. “It’s actually physical. You can feel ill when something’s happening and you want to be there.”
“I still have the pang when something happens in, actually, quite a few parts of the world.
“Once in a while I’ll say, okay, right, I’m just going to narrow it down. The pang will only work − I’ll only allow it to work − for Afghanistan. And maybe for Jordan. And okay, Ukraine. Oh yeah, Sudan.”
Over the course of her career, technology has revolutionised the way reporting is done in those places. But that comes with downsides.
“I have to say that it’s the kind of job where, when you’re in the field, you’re on the story from the moment you open your eyes in the morning to reach for your phone to the moment that you close your eyes at night and you put away your phone,” she says. “And sometimes you don’t even put away your phone.
“It’s literally around the clock. We have to do TV, radio, online, social media, the live page, podcasts … it’s unrelenting. When I went to Iran recently, we slept on average three to four hours a night. You just keep going.
“Nobody’s told me yet it’s time to hang up your hat.”
In London, she still reports and gives insight on television, radio and online, including on the BBC’s growing range of podcasts.
“You don’t have to be away,” she says. “But I think if you really want to understand what’s happening, you have to keep returning to the heat and the dust. Talk to people face to face. Really feel the story.”
The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet is published by Penguin
