Seize opportunity she did. Despite the 4% admittance rate, the young literature graduate was accepted to the elite Iowa Writers’ Workshop MFA program, and her experiences there sound almost identical to that of Hannah Horvath’s (Lena Dunham’s character in Girls). “There were only two nice people in the class – me and Suketa Mehta who later won the American Book Award for Maximum City,” she says, half-joking. “In those days my aim was to be a novelist but I felt as though I hadn’t lived enough. I didn’t want to write fiction about being 23 and disillusioned, and the life of a writer is a lonely one – I desperately wanted to get out in the world.”

A few years later, in the late 1980s, while studying for her second masters in London, di Giovanni’s “academic bubble”, as she calls it, finally burst when she saw a photograph in a newspaper of a Palestinian boy being buried alive by an Israeli soldier. Soon afterwards she boarded a plane to report on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “As a writer it’s not my place to judge. Of course I have my own views and opinions, but my job is to tell a balanced story so readers can make up their own minds,” she explains.

Within a decade di Giovanni had cemented her name as a world-renowned correspondent, and was writing cover articles for The New York Times and Vanity Fair. Her story, Madness Visible, for the latter described her experiences during the Balkan wars and earned her the prestigious National Magazine Award in 1999, and in 2005 she was the subject of the documentary Bearing Witness by Oscar-winning director Barbara Kopple.

The film follows five female reporters working in Iraq during the Second Gulf War, and also profiled di Giovanni’s friend and colleague the late Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times, who was killed in the Siege of Homs. “Marie was a very glamorous creature,” she recalls. “The first time we met was at the photocopier at the Times and she was wearing a beautiful Calvin Klein dress having come from a wedding. She was a great listener, I remember her consoling me as we drove to work one day after I had broken up with a boyfriend.”

While di Giovanni and I are talking she receives a message from the father of Steve Sotloff, the Time journalist beheaded by Islamic State militants 18 months ago. As one of the last people to see him alive, he has asked her what her final memories are of his son. It’s a stark reminder of the dangers correspondents face in order to disseminate Syria’s current affairs. But over the years do you become desensitised to these risks? I ask. “Of course I still feel fear, especially of being maimed,” she says. “If I lost my sight how would I work? How would I survive? Marie lost an eye and continued to work but she found it very hard.”