Kate Adie, author and broadcaster, became a familiar figure to people through her work as Chief News Correspondent, BBC News (British Broadcasting Corporation), and is considered to be among the very finest reporters, as well as one of the first British women, sending despatches from danger zones around the world. She is also familiar as the presenter of Radio Four’s From Our Own Correspondent and a guest on many other radio and television programmes. She has been named ‘Reporter of the Year’ twice by the Royal Television Society; the first occasion was for her coverage of the SAS end to the Iranian Embassy siege in 1973. She also won the Monte Carlo International Golden Nymph Award in 1981 and 1990, and was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 1993.
Kate grew up in Sunderland and gained her BA from Newcastle University where she read Swedish. She was a member of the National Youth Theatre and still attends the theatre and visits galleries when time permits. She is an avid reader of both fiction and history, and has served as a judge for literary prizes, including the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Costa. Kate has also served as a trustee of the Imperial War Museum, and her illustrated, companion history to the museum’s new permanent exhibition about women in uniform, Corsets to Camouflage, was published by Hodder & Stoughton to coincide with its opening in the autumn of 2003.
Her first book, The Kindness of Strangers, an account of her work as a reporter and how she came to undertake it, delete ‘was’ published by Headline was on the Sunday Times best seller list for 37 weeks Hodder & Stoughton has now published Nobody’s Child: The Lives of Abandoned Children (2005) which formed the basis of two, BBC 1 documentaries series, FOUND, and, most recently, INTO DANGER, (2008) a study of what drives the men and women who have jobs that could cause their deaths. That comes out in paperback in April of this year.
She lives just outside London.
Details of this year’s festival programme can be found elsewhere on this website.
