- published: 30 Jun 2015
- views: 29298
Sian Mary Williams (born 28 November 1964; "Sian", pronounced [ˈʃɑn]) is a British journalist and current affairs presenter. From 2005 to March 2012, she was a co-presenter of BBC Breakfast on Mondays to Thursdays alongside Bill Turnbull. Williams regularly presented the News at Six and occasionally presented the News at One and the News at Ten.
Williams was born in Paddington, London, to Welsh parents, and raised in Eastbourne, East Sussex. Her mother, Katherine Rees from Llanelli, had moved to London to become a nurse. Williams' father was from Swansea, and his family had been farmers in Glamorgan, south Wales. She gained a BA in English and History from Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University), and was also a student of Japanese and international business at Liverpool John Moores University.
Prior to her career in television journalism, Williams spent over a decade with BBC Radio after joining the corporation in 1985. She worked on BBC Local Radio in Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester before becoming a producer and reporter in Liverpool, and later joining a national spoken word network, BBC Radio 4, as a producer on The World at One and PM programmes. Williams spent the next few years reporting and editing news programmes on the station, and also on BBC Radio 5 Live.