Stephen Sackur

Stephen John Sackur (born 9 January 1964) is an English journalist who presents HARDtalk, a current affairs interview programme on BBC World News and the BBC News Channel. He is also the main Friday presenter of GMT on BBC World News. For fifteen years he was a BBC foreign correspondent and he is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4 and a number of newspapers and magazines.

Life

Sackur was born in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, England, and studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is married to an Iraqi, Zina Sabbagh and has three children.

Career

Sackur began working at the BBC as a trainee in 1986, and in 1990, he was appointed as one of its foreign affairs correspondents. As a BBC Radio correspondent, Sackur reported on the Velvet Revolution of Czechoslovakia in 1989 and the reunification of Germany in 1990. During the Gulf War, he was part of a BBC team covering the conflict and spent eight weeks with the British Army. At the end of the war, he was the first correspondent to report the massacre of the retreating Iraqi army on the road leading out of Kuwait.

HARDtalk

Hardtalk (styled as HARDtalk) is a BBC television and radio programme, consisting of in-depth 25-minute one-on-one interviews.

It is broadcast four days a week (Monday to Thursday) on BBC World News and the BBC News channel. Launched in 1997, much of its worldwide fame is due to its global reach via BBC World. Until early 2005, the host was Tim Sebastian, whose famous, and sometimes controversial, style of tough questioning brought a huge world audience to the show. It is normally broadcast late at night on the BBC News Channel. Until the mid-2000s, it was broadcast at around 11:30 pm, but in more recent times it has been broadcast an hour later at 12:30 am. In 2015 it was moved to an earlier slot 20:30 in the evening as part of a changes to the channel.

Since 2004, the show has been presented by Stephen Sackur, who was previously the BBC's correspondent in Washington and Brussels and who is an experienced interviewer who has grilled U.S. Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He is sporadically replaced by several other well-known BBC presenters such as Zeinab Badawi, Carrie Gracie and Sarah Montague. Other occasional presenters have included Jon Sopel, David Jessel, Lyse Doucet, Nisha Pillai, Noel Thompson, Mishal Husain and Katya Adler.