Alex Crawford adamant her place is on the front line

Alex Crawford could not have looked more uncomfortable as she collected her Royal Television Society award for Journalist of the Year - her third in a row, and her fourth in total.

The flowing turquoise frock, the ceremony in Park Lane, the adoration - these are things that clearly sit awkwardly with a woman who last year stuck on a hard hat and a flak jacket and rode into Green Square with Libyan rebels, the only reporter to do so.

But her discomfort was more than that. On the morning of the awards, Crawford had found out that Marie Colvin, her friend and colleague, had been killed in a rocket attack in Syria. Colvin died alongside the French photographer Remi Ochlik. She was 56, Ochlik just 28.

I meet Crawford hours after the news trickles through from Syria. The Sky News reporter is based in Johannesburg (previous postings include Delhi and Dubai); she has come to Britain for just two days to attend the RTS awards, where she will be honoured for her "brave, vivid conflict reporting of the highest order", and deliver a speech to students at the University of Kent.

When she arrives at the chichi brasserie in Chiswick she seems quiet, disjointed. In a gilet, jeans and pashmina, Crawford doesn't look out of place, but it is clear she feels it - last week Syria, today a restaurant owned by Soho House.

The 49 year-old seems to be slowly digesting the news. She says she is "shocked" by it. She orders a latte and a salad and says that everyone knew Marie, "everyone! If you did any similar reporting to her then you were constantly bumping into her. She was everywhere. And she was one of those that stayed for months. She didn't pop in and out like the rest of us did. She stayed and lived and moved and breathed and was just passionate about it, an icon for us all".

The last time Crawford saw Colvin was in Misurata, and when she talks about her colleague she does so as if she were still alive.

"She had been there quite a long time. She's always in these places for quite a long time. She beds in. She's very, very committed. When Libya finally fell her photographer was with us [Paul Conroy, who was also injured in Wednesday's attack], and Marie was desperately trying to get back from her holiday.

"She had gone to Malta, and was trying to turn the boat back to Misurata. He [Conroy] was going on about how frustrated she was. I feel so shocked. I looked up to her. She had such experience and longevity and she was a survivor of so many wars. That makes you really think."

But it does not make Crawford question the job she has always longed to do, ever since she was a little girl growing up in the adventurous environs of Zimbabwe and Zambia.

Crawford has rung her husband this morning to tell him about Colvin; he is also a journalist, who gave up his job at the Independent to look after their four children, aged between nine and 17. "I think he finds it hard at times," she concedes.

She finds the "mum of four goes to war" line sexist; after all, nobody ever questions the motives of fathers who go to war, and she wonders if being female isn't actually quite helpful, delivering as it tends to the necessary qualities of compassion and empathy. Then again, perhaps that attitude is similarly sexist. Crawford becomes animated when talking about what she does, her passion almost erupting on to the table. "Someone has got to do this job and be there to uncover the things that nobody knows about, to expose the crimes that are being committed, to show what life is like for ordinary people.

"The people in Syria, like the people in Libya, are absolutely desperate for the outside world to notice them. When you come in as a Western journalist, they see you as their hope. It is a huge responsibility and it is a moral duty."

She tells me the story of a 17-year-old boy who had been shot through the head by a sniper in Syria. "His brother had also been shot trying to help, while his sister was shot in the eye.

"Three young people in one family, the 17-year-old lad dead. But when I interviewed the father he was too terrified to talk. Most people don't want to be identified on television for fear of getting a visit from the Syrian army. Isn't that awful?"

Crawford has only been scared for her life once, in the Libyan town of Zawiya, when she was stuck in a three-hour gun battle in a mosque. "But that is not to say that I'm not frightened all the time. The minute you cross a border into a war zone, you do not relax."

She has been arrested "under 10" times, a roundabout figure she comes up with counting on her fingers. "My daughter asked me that the other day and I couldn't answer," she laughs. "But I've been hosted by quite a selection of despotic regimes. Pakistan; Afghanistan; Sri Lanka; Egypt; Turkey the other day, as we were leaving Syria. We spent 14 hours in a prison cell as they went through all of our stuff and all I could think was 'Oh God, where did I put those dirty knickers?'?"

She isn't sure how aware her children are of what she does, and feels guilty every time she goes away. "When I get home I think I slightly overcompensate - at least that's what my husband has told me. I have had to narrow down the gifts I buy them, otherwise we'd be bankrupt very soon."

They have lived all over the world, but as yet they don't seem to thank their mother for it. "They've sort of loved each place we've been in eventually," she muses.

When I ask her if she thinks that war correspondents are by and large dysfunctional human beings, she says: "Oh God, yeah, and now my family are dysfunctional as a result of me. It's not normal not to have a mother there. And I feel as if I'm not being a terribly good mother a lot of the time."

She took them skiing recently - to Kashmir. "Dead cheap, nobody tends to go there, army airport, one ski lift, but it's fabulous, the best skiing in the world. We had a minivan to take us to the mountains and we had to go through checkpoints. There were army people doing sweeps of the road and my kids are asking why - they were clearly looking for roadside bombs." Crawford sees the look of horror on my face. "But it's really not that dangerous!" She has seen heads blown off, "holes in ankles, and in Bahrain I saw a guy who had an anti-tank missile sticking out of his thigh. That was what it was like in Libya too, and I am sure that is what it is like in Homs".

She is remarkably measured when describing how it affects her ("there were definitely times in the past year when I had an overload of traumatic experiences") and when I point this out to her, she says: "I don't know how else you would really put it."

Crawford borrows from Colvin when explaining why it is all worth it. "In 2010, Marie gave an address at a special service at St Bride's [in Fleet Street], for journalists who had been killed in war. She said that most correspondents feel very passionately about what they do and that someone has to be there. And that's how I feel. Of course you know that there is a risk.

"You must weigh up whether that risk is worth taking. And at the end of the day, I think that it is."