Afua Hirsch’s work returns to a question that reaches beyond any one book, column or television programme: who gets to belong in Britain, and whose account of the country is heard? As a journalist, author and broadcaster, she has brought debates about race, empire and public memory to readers and viewers well beyond specialist circles. Her career has ranged from legal reporting and social affairs to children’s writing and documentary television, but it repeatedly examines how institutions and national stories shape people’s lives.
A British life with more than one inheritance
Hirsch was born in Stavanger, Norway, to a British father and a Ghanaian mother, and grew up in Wimbledon, south-west London. Her family history spans different experiences of displacement and national change. Her paternal grandfather, who was Jewish, fled Berlin in 1938; her maternal grandfather was involved in establishing Ghana’s education system after independence and later became a political exile. These histories form part of the background to a writer whose work considers how identity, citizenship and historical memory meet.
She attended Wimbledon High School and studied philosophy, politics and economics at St Peter’s College, Oxford, from 1999 to 2002. After graduating, she studied law at BPP Law School, qualified as a barrister in 2006 and trained at Doughty Street Chambers. The move from law into journalism was not simply a change of subject. Her early professional experience brought her close to questions about how rules and institutions affect individuals; later reporting would examine power at both that personal scale and the scale of the state.
Hirsch began reporting for The Voice, a Black British newspaper, at 14. That early start placed journalism within a community readership from the outset. It also offers context for her later insistence that national debates should not be confined to the assumptions or vocabulary of the most powerful institutions. Her subsequent career would move between specialist reporting and general audiences, carrying questions of law, identity and public history into different forms.
Law, reporting and public affairs
Before establishing herself in journalism, Hirsch worked in law as a barrister. She has described cases involving legal aid, homelessness, immigration, asylum, disability, criminal defence and press freedom, as well as international war crimes. This range helps explain why her journalism has covered more than debates about identity. Access to representation and the exercise of state power have been recurring concerns in her professional life.
At The Guardian, Hirsch worked as a legal correspondent and later as the newspaper’s West Africa correspondent, based in Accra. Her reporting included secret courts, control orders, extraordinary rendition, the legality of the Iraq war, the DNA database and terrorism trials. From West Africa she covered regional affairs, including Mali and illegal Chinese gold mining in Ghana. The breadth matters: although her public profile is closely associated with race and belonging, her reporting also dealt with law, conflict, politics and economics.
From 2014 to 2017 she was Sky News’s Social Affairs and Education Editor. The role brought her into television journalism at a senior level and placed her among reporters examining schools, social policy and the pressures shaping everyday life. She also appeared as a panellist on Sky’s discussion programme The Pledge. Across these formats, a consistent interest emerges: how broad political decisions are experienced by people, and how the present connects to a longer history.
Brit(ish) and the question of belonging
Hirsch’s best-known book, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging, was published in 2018. Part memoir and part examination of Black history, culture and politics, it considers what Britishness means, particularly for people whose appearance or ancestry can lead others to treat their belonging as provisional. The book sets personal experience alongside history and public argument, rather than treating identity as separate from the institutions and stories that shape national life.
Brit(ish) became a Sunday Times bestseller. Hirsch received the Royal Society of Literature’s Jerwood Prize for Non-Fiction while writing it, in 2016. Its reach helped bring a historically informed discussion of race and belonging to a broad readership. The book’s method is central to its importance: memoir gives the questions human scale, while political and historical analysis shows how experiences of inclusion and exclusion connect to structures beyond any one individual.
Hirsch’s writing has also addressed the way Britain remembers its past. In an August 2017 Guardian article, she questioned whether Nelson’s Column should remain in place, prompting public argument over monuments and the country’s imperial history. Hirsch later said that the suggestion of removing the column distracted from her main concern: that Britain should look more carefully at its past to understand itself better in the present. Her argument was not a simple demand to erase a monument, but a challenge to consider what public commemoration says and leaves unsaid.
In 2018, Channel 4 broadcast her documentary The Battle for Britain’s Heroes. The programme examined national commemoration and aspects of Winston Churchill’s record, including his attitude to Indians and advocacy of tear-gassing in Mesopotamia after the First World War. It brought historical interpretation into a public television setting, where its claims could be scrutinised and debated by a broad audience. That debate itself illustrates the stakes of Hirsch’s work: deciding how to remember a national figure also involves deciding which parts of the record belong in public view.
Books that make institutions and culture legible
Hirsch has written for readers at different stages of life. Equal to Everything: Judge Brenda and the Supreme Court, published in 2019, is a children’s book about Lady Brenda Hale. By introducing a senior legal figure and the Supreme Court to younger readers, it extends her interest in how public institutions can be explained and made open to examination. The subject is distinct from her writing on race and national memory, but it shares an impulse to make authority understandable rather than remote.
Her 2023 book, Decolonising My Body: A Radical Exploration of Rituals and Beauty, moves from the national questions explored in Brit(ish) towards the personal and cultural meanings of beauty and the body. Read together, the books show a writer extending her concerns rather than repeating one subject in one form: identity and history are explored through public institutions, cultural expectations and personal experience.
Hirsch has written for publications including The Guardian, The Observer, The Evening Standard, Vogue and Prospect. Her work has moved across public affairs and culture, and in 2019 she served on the judging panel for the Booker Prize for Fiction. This range is part of the shape of her career: journalism, commentary and books have allowed her to address questions in formats suited to different audiences, rather than confining her to one role or subject.
Documentaries and a wider frame
Television has given Hirsch another way to bring historical and cultural questions before a general audience. In 2020 she co-presented the six-part documentary series Enslaved with Samuel L. Jackson. The series explored the history and afterlives of the transatlantic slave trade, including connections to personal histories. Its subject reaches beyond Britain, but it speaks to questions that also animate Hirsch’s British work: how the past continues to shape the present, and what is lost when that inheritance goes unexamined.
Also in 2020, she presented African Renaissance: When Art Meets Power on BBC Four. The series took her to Ethiopia, Senegal and Kenya, where she met artists and musicians and explored the histories of those countries. In 2023 she presented the three-part BBC documentary series Africa Rising with Afua Hirsch, following younger creatives reshaping culture across Africa through music, art, weaving, photography and fashion.
These programmes widen the geographical frame of her work without making Britain irrelevant to it. They bring viewers into contact with histories and cultural production that can be overlooked in accounts centred narrowly on Europe. Hirsch’s approach links particular people and creative work to larger questions of power, history and representation. Television makes those questions visible in places, artworks and conversations, rather than leaving them only as abstractions on an opinion page.
In 2021 it was announced that Hirsch’s production company, Born in Me, had signed a deal with Fremantle. Her work as a presenter and producer has developed alongside her writing and reporting. She also holds the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Journalism and Communication at the University of Southern California, an appointment announced in 2018. The role reflects the international reach of her work, while her writing and broadcasting continue to return to British institutions and debates.
Recognition and a continuing argument
Hirsch’s public standing has been recognised in several ways. She was included in the Powerlist’s 2020 edition, which recognises influential Britons of African and African-Caribbean heritage, and was named among the top 100 most influential Africans by New African magazine in 2020. In 2024 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Recognition is not the whole measure of her contribution. Her work can provoke disagreement, particularly when it challenges familiar accounts of national heroes or asks how imperial history should be remembered. The response to her writing about Nelson’s Column and the documentary on Britain’s heroes shows that these are contested subjects. But disagreement does not make the underlying questions marginal: Hirsch’s books, journalism and documentaries have helped bring them into mainstream conversation, where they can be tested, challenged and developed.
Her career also resists being reduced to one label. She has worked in law and news, written for adults and children, reported from West Africa, presented programmes about history and art, and taken up an academic journalism chair in the United States. The common thread is an interest in how stories are made and who has the authority to tell them. That concern gives coherence to work carried out across different subjects, formats and audiences, and helps explain why her British work can sit alongside international reporting and documentary projects.
Why Afua Hirsch deserves a place in British Legacy
Afua Hirsch deserves a place in British Legacy because she has used accessible forms of journalism and culture to bring difficult questions about Britain into public view. Her work on race, belonging and empire does not treat history as a closed subject or a specialist possession. Through Brit(ish), newspaper reporting and television, she asks how national identity is formed, whose experiences it includes, and how the past continues to influence the present. The value of that work is not that it removes disagreement. It gives readers and viewers material with which to understand and argue about the country more fully.
Her contribution is concrete in its range. She has reported on legal power and social affairs, written a children’s introduction to the Supreme Court, and presented programmes on national commemoration, the transatlantic slave trade and contemporary African creativity. These projects connect audiences to subjects that can otherwise remain distant or narrowly framed. Her British connection is not simply a matter of biography: she has repeatedly examined British institutions, public memory and belonging from within the country’s own media and literary culture. By making those debates intelligible to broad audiences, Hirsch has helped enlarge the stories through which Britain can understand itself.
Sources
Adapted in part from Afua Hirsch by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.
