Award-winning journalist, writer and broadcaster Samira Ahmed presents the BBC’s flagship arts show Front Row on Radio 4, where she regularly interviews leading writers, actors, and directors. She also scrutinises BBC journalism and editorial decision-making on behalf of viewers and listeners on her Newswatch programme on BBC One. She’s the author of a BFI Film Classics book on the Beatles’ first film A Hard Day’s Night. Samira is also President of the Twentieth Century Society, which campaigns to protect modern architectural heritage and design. She co-hosts the TV history podcast Through the Square Window and writes a column for New Humanist magazine. In 2023, she made headlines around the world for uncovering the earliest complete concert recording of the Beatles...
Award-winning journalist, writer and broadcaster Samira Ahmed presents the BBC’s flagship arts show Front Row on Radio 4, where she regularly interviews leading writers, actors, and directors. She also scrutinises BBC journalism and editorial decision-making on behalf of viewers and listeners on her Newswatch programme on BBC One. She’s the author of a BFI Film Classics book on the Beatles’ first film A Hard Day’s Night. Samira is also President of the Twentieth Century Society, which campaigns to protect modern architectural heritage and design. She co-hosts the TV history podcast Through the Square Window and writes a column for New Humanist magazine.
In 2023, she made headlines around the world for uncovering the earliest complete concert recording of the Beatles performing in the UK, at Stowe School in 1963, and helped to secure its acquisition by the British Library for the nation.
She was named British Broadcasting Press Guild audio presenter of the year in 2020, the same year she won a landmark sex discrimination employment tribunal against the BBC for equal pay on Newswatch.
Her acclaimed three-part BBC4 documentary series Art of Persia (2020) was one of the first major Western television series to be filmed in Iran for 40 years.
Samira was previously a news anchor and correspondent for Channel 4 News, where she won the Stonewall Broadcast of the Year award for her film about the so-called “corrective” rape of lesbian women in South Africa; and for BBC News, where she covered the OJ Simpson case while LA Correspondent.
Her many documentaries explore the intersection of popular culture, science, politics, and social change. They include I Dressed Ziggy Stardust, Laura Ingalls’ America, John Ruskin’s Eurythmic Girls, HG Wells and the H Bomb, The Fundamentalist Queen – about Elizabeth Cromwell, wife of Oliver – and Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse, for which she spent months studying the diaries of the famous morality campaigner.
Samira is a trustee of the Centre for Women’s Justice and the Pilgrim Trust and is on the blue plaques advisory board for Historic England. She has served on the advisory board of the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford and the editorial review board of Doctor Who magazine. She is an honorary fellow of St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, and holds honorary doctorates in law, arts and social sciences from the University of East Anglia, City, University of London, Kingston University and Winchester University.
