Hilton, 46, is the foreign news editor of The Canberra Times. He has traveled extensively in the Southeast Asia region, and studied Indonesian language and culture while on a journalism fellowship at Sacha Wacana University in central Java in 1998. He also worked as a sub-editor on the Sydney Morning Herald and was chief sub-editor at the Illawarra Mercury in Wollongong, New South Wales.

He holds an MA Honours in journalism and is in the final stages of completing a PhD thesis at the University of Wollongong which looks at issues in the South African print media.

Through his three-months fellowship to India, Hilton hopes to raise awareness and to stimulate a broader range of contacts, information, knowledge and interest in the region. He hopes this fellowship will result in an improvement of quality and focus on news reported on the subcontinent. Overall, he said the fellowship should offer an added dimension of knowledge and experience from an important, though media-neglected, part of the world.