Samira Ahmed

Award winning journalist and broadcaster Samira Ahmed presents Front Row on Radio 4 and Newswatch on BBC1. 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 tv series to be filmed in Iran for 40 years. 

She 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. In April 2023 Samira made headlines around the world after uncovering the earliest complete concert recording of the Beatles in Britain, at Stowe School in 1963. Her many documentaries explore the intersection of popular culture, science, politics, and social change. 

They include Radio 4’s 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, Humanists UK and on the advisory board of the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford and national Blue Plaques panel for Historic England. She is an honorary fellow of St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford.