Born in Southampton, England, John Hiscock joined his first newspaper, the East Essex Gazette, at age 15, and since then has reported on major international news stories from three continents. In London, he worked for the Ilford Pictorial, Chelsea News and joined a fellow journalist in freelancing from the Royal Courts of Justice, covering divorces and high court cases for national newspapers. He joined the Daily Sketch, a national newspaper headquartered in London in 1969, and when it folded in 1972, went on to the Daily Mail, then The Sun, which Rupert Murdoch had recently bought. News stories he covered from the U.K included the Northern Ireland sectarian battles, the military coup in Portugal, and the Turkish Airlines DC10 crash in Paris. Hiscock then moved to Australia and worked on The Australian and later the Sydney Daily Mirror before moving to New York with Murdoch’s News Corporation news bureau, supplying stories to his English and Australian outlets. He then moved to Los Angeles where he was the West Coast bureau chief for the Daily Telegraph, covering earthquakes in L.A and Mexico City, the Korean Airlines air crash in Guam, the John Lennon assassination, mass shootings, gang wars, a Democratic Convention, a World Cup, the 1984 Olympics and the O.J. Simpson trial, among many other stories. He switched to writing features in 2000 after joining the HFPA.