Gavin Esler

Gavin Esler is an award winning television and radio broadcaster, journalist and author. He is one of the three main presenters on BBC2’s Newsnight, the main presenter on Dateline London on BBC World and the BBC News Channel. He is also the author of several books, both fiction and non-fiction.

Gavin began his journalism career with The Belfast Telegraph and then moved to the BBC, where he became Chief North America Correspondent (1989-97).

He has reported from countries as diverse as China, Peru, Argentina, Cuba, Brazil, Russia, Jordan, Iran, Saudia Arabia and from the Aleutian Islands. He has interviewed world leaders ranging from Mrs Thatcher, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, John Major, King Abdullah of Jordan and President Chirac to President Clinton, President Carter, Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega and Israel’s Shimon Peres.

In the arts and culture programmes he has also interviewed writers and artists ranging from V S Naipaul, Seamus Heaney and Anita Desai to Jose Carreras, Dolly Parton, Angelina Jolie and Penelope Cruz, plus numerous film-makers including John Boorman, Peter Bogdanovich, Terry Jones and Stephen Frears.

He is a frequent newspaper and magazine columnist with publications including in The Scotsman, The Mail, The Mail on Sunday, The Mirror, The Independent, La Vie, and The New Statesman.

His novels – Loyalties, Deep Blue, The Blood Brother, and A Scandalous Man  – were followed in 2010 with the paperback publication of Powerplay, in which the Vice President of the United States travels to Britain and then goes missing, an event which signals the end of the so-called US-UK “special relationship.” Reviewers have been full of praise for his fiction and story-telling abilities.

He is a BAFTA member, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and the holder of a Royal Television Society award for a documentary about the Aleutian Islands. He was also awarded a Sony Gold Award in 2007 for a radio documentary on prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.