To use the luminous gamma‐ray bursts and their afterglows as messengers from the early Universe has been advocated ever since the discovery of the cosmological nature of the GRB phenomenon in the late nineties. It took, however, until the advent of Swift to detect high‐redshift GRBs in significant numbers, and to provide the localization capabilities to enable statistical samples of GRBs free of selection biases and complete in redshift. I will present and discuss some of the recent progress in the field, with an emphasize on new results derived from sample studies and their implications for the nature of GRBs and their host galaxies. I will particularly focus on observations made with the seven‐channel imager GROND and X‐shooter, an optical/NIR echelle spectrograph mounted at the Very Large Telescope since 2009. (© 2015 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)