Ben Brown

Ben Brown is an Award Winning BBC News Presenter, Conference Host and Facilitator.

Ben Brown anchors BBC News 24 on weekdays, between 7.00pm and 10.00pm, and regularly presents the 6 o’clock news and weekend bulletins on BBC 1

Ben Brown was a BBC Special Correspondent from January 1998 until April 2006, one of the BBC’s most experienced war correspondents and has also covered major domestic events such as the Queen Mother’s funeral, the Tsunami from Thailand and Indonesia, the New Orleans hurricane and the earthquake in Pakistan. He often visited Iraq, usually being embedded with British or American troops. He covered the invasion alongside soldiers from the UK as they captured Basra.

Ben was born on 26 May 1960 and was brought up in Ashford, Kent. He was educated at Sutton Valance School and Keble College, Oxford. He then went to the Cardiff Centre for Journalism Studies and received a diploma with distinction.

After leaving college he joined Radio Clyde as a reporter and in 1985 he became a reporter for Radio City Liverpool.

Ben Brown joined Independent Radio News in 1986, covering major stories from superpower summits to the Hungerford massacre.

He joined the BBC in July 1988 and was a Foreign Affairs Correspondent until 1991, reporting the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Gulf war, from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

In 1991 he was appointed Moscow Correspondent, where he witnessed the final collapse of communism and the fall of Mikhail Gorbachev.

He was at the Russian Parliament when troops loyal to President Yeltsin stormed it in 1993 and the following year he was in Chechnya for the start of the civil war. His coverage of that conflict won him several international prizes, including the Bayeux War Correspondent of the Year Award and the Golden Nymph Award from the Monte Carlo Television Festival.

In January 1995 Ben resumed his roving role as a Foreign Affairs Correspondent based in London.

He has covered the break up of Yugoslavia extensively, reporting from Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, where his stories helped to secure several awards for the BBC, including a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Award).

In 2000 Ben won a RTS (Royal Television Society) award for his report from a white farm in Zimbabwe that he was trapped inside whilst it was invaded by armed militants.

In 2001 he won the Bayeux War Correspondent Award for the second time for his coverage of the intifada in Israel.