Sackur has been a journalist with BBC News since 1986, as BBC European, Washington, Middle East and Foreign Correspondent.
He is widely respected as an outstanding interviewer and moderator, with a superb knowledge of current affairs, and an affable, yet no nonsense style. Capable of getting right to the heart of the matter of a vast range of subjects and issues, Sackur is among the finest of presenters. He was awarded the ‘International TV Personality of the Year Award’ by the Association of International Broadcasters in 2010, and nominated as 'Speech Broadcaster of the Year' at the Sony Radio Awards 2013.
Since becoming presenter of HARDtalk in 2004, he has interviewed prominent international personalities, including former US vice-president Al Gore, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Shimon Peres, Mahmoud Abbas, and a host of other leaders and politicians from around the world. He has also interviewed leading cultural figures including Gore Vidal, Richard Dawkins, and Noam Chomsky.
As a BBC journalist, prior to presenting HARDtalk, Sackur covered many of the pivotal news events of recent history. He was the BBC's European Correspondent for 3 years, during which he covered the Madrid terrorist attacks in 2004, and the EU expansion. As the BBC's Washington Correspondent 1997-2001 he interviewed President George W. Bush, covered the 2000 US Presidential Elections, and the Clinton scandal. He was the BBC Middle East Correspondent (1992-1997), covering the peace process, the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the emergence of the Palestinian Authority under the late Yasser Arafat. In 1990 he was part of the BBC's team of correspondents covering the Gulf War, and the first correspondent to break the story of the mass killing on the Basra road out of Kuwait City, marking the end of the war. He travelled back to Iraq just after the downfall of Saddam Hussein, and filed the first television reports on Iraq's mass graves.
He has contributed countless articles to The Observer, The London Review of Books, New Statesman, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph. In 1991 he wrote 'On the Basra Road'. Sackur studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
