In a varied career that has taken her from being a barrister, to a journalist, to a bestselling author, Afua has written extensively on racism, Britain’s history, cultural identity, education and politics. A regular face on television, Afua is also a BBC presenter and documentary filmmaker.
View / Submit"Everyone found her really engaging and the topic was excellent. Was a real privilege to have her speak at the University."
University of Glasgow
Afua Hirsch is a writer, broadcaster and former barrister known for her work on culture, social justice. Identity and anti-racism. She is the founder of Born in Me, a TV and film production company which creates scripted and non-scripted television documentaries, dramas, and podcasts. Afua is the presenter of the BBC series African Renaissance, and Enslaved, a six-part series about the transatlantic slave trade with Samuel L Jackson, as well as a podcast series for Audible. She was creative chair of the Edinburgh TV Festival, the most prestigious TV event in the UK.
A journalist for more than twenty years, Afua began writing for the Voice Newspaper, Britain’s oldest black newspaper, as a teenager in the mid-nineties. Since then, she has been a senior Guardian correspondent, Sky News editor, and regularly writes for publications including the New York Times, Time Magazine, American and British Vogue, where she is a contributing editor.
Her bestselling book Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging is the winner of the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize. Her other books include Equal To Everything, about the UK Supreme Court, and Empire: Look Again. In Decolonising My Body, Afua provides an excavation of the Eurocentric beauty standards that have long shaped how those from the Global Majority are perceived and view themselves.
With Peter Frankopan, Afua hosts the podcast Legacy, which places historic figures from the past under a contemporary spotlight to explore their lives from the perspective of now.
Afua holds a degree from Oxford University, and honorary doctorates from London’s South Bank University and The University of Oxford Brookes. She has been voted one of the ten most influential black people in the UK and the hundred most influential people of African descent in the world. Afua became the Wallis Annenberg Chair of Journalism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she teachers graduate students on international reporting.
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