Kate Adie is a best-selling author and broadcaster, and achieved fame through her work as the BBC’s Chief News Correspondent, a role she was promoted to following her coverage of the killing in Tiananmen Square.
Kate was one of the first British women to send dispatches from danger zones around the world. She covered the Gulf War, and events in former Yugoslavia, Armenia, Albania, Rwanda and China as well as disasters in and around the United Kingdom.
Kate was 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 in 1993.
Kate is an avid reader of both fiction and history, and has served as a judge for literary prizes, including the Orange Prize for Fiction, the old Whitbread and the Costa. Kate has also served as a trustee of the Imperial War Museum, and her illustrated, companion history to the museum’s exhibition about women in uniform, Corsets to Camouflage, was published to coincide with its opening in 2003.
Her first book, The Kindness of Strangers, an account of her work as a reporter and how she came to undertake it, remained on the Sunday Times best seller list for 37 weeks. She has also published Nobody’s Child: The Lives of Abandoned Children (2005) which formed the basis of the BBC 1 documentaries series, Found, and Into Danger (2008) which studied men and women who risk their lives for work. Her most recent book, entitled Fighting on the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in World War One, was published in 2013.
