Samira Ahmed

Samira Ahmed (born 15 June 1968) is a British journalist, writer and broadcaster. She presents Front Row on BBC Radio 4 and Newswatch on BBC One, previously spent eleven years at Channel 4 News, won a landmark equal-pay tribunal against the BBC in 2020, and writes a regular column for New Humanist magazine. ¹

Ahmed was born in Wandsworth, south London, on 15 June 1968 to Athar and Lalita Ahmed; her mother, born Chatterjee in Lucknow, is a cookery writer and former television presenter who worked for the BBC World Service's Hindi service and All India Radio. ^{1 2} She attended Wimbledon High School, read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where she edited the student magazines Isis and Union and won the Philip Geddes Journalism Prize, and completed a postgraduate diploma in newspaper journalism at City University, London. ¹ She was previously married to Brian Millar, and they have a son and a daughter. ¹ From 2023 to 2024 she was a trustee of Humanists UK, the humanist charity whose magazine, New Humanist, carries her regular column. ^{1 3}

Ahmed became a BBC news trainee in 1990 and worked as a radio reporter and a Newsnight reporter before serving as the BBC's Los Angeles correspondent in 1996–1997, covering the O. J. Simpson civil trial. ¹ After a spell at Deutsche Welle in Berlin she joined Channel 4 News in 2000, becoming a presenter in 2002; her 2009 report on so-called corrective rape in South Africa won Broadcaster of the Year at the Stonewall Awards. ¹ She left Channel 4 in 2011, presented Sunday Morning Live from 2012 to 2013, and succeeded Ray Snoddy as presenter of Newswatch in October 2012. ¹ In October 2019 she brought an equal-pay claim against the BBC over her Newswatch pay; the employment tribunal found unanimously in her favour on 10 January 2020, and a settlement followed. ¹ Her documentaries include Art of Persia (2020), a three-part study of Iranian history and culture, and Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse (2022). ¹ In April 2023 she revealed on Front Row the earliest complete recording of a Beatles concert in the UK, taped at Stowe School in 1963, and her BFI Film Classics book on the Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night followed. ¹ She was named the Broadcasting Press Guild's audio presenter of the year in March 2020. ¹

• The source entities cited above, registered under data/source/.