George Alagiah

George Maxwell Alagiah

London

George Alagiah was a newsreader, foreign correspondent, television presenter and writer, who worked for BBC News. He was born in Colombo, then Ceylon, in 1955 but moved to Ghana at the age of 6 when his father, an engineer working in water infrastructure, was offered employment there.

Aged 11, he was enrolled at St John's College, Portsmouth. He went on to study politics at Durham University and served as editor of the student newspaper and was also a sabbatical officer of Durham Students’ Union. Before joining the BBC in 1989, he worked for South Magazine as its Africa editor.

He came to prominence as the BBC’s Africa correspondent, covering the end of apartheid, US intervention and famine in Somalia, and the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi in the 1990s, for which he was awarded the Amnesty International UK Media Award. He also covered the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, for which he received many awards, including a BAFTA for his coverage of the conflict in Kosovo. In 1999 he became one of the main news anchors of the BBC’s flagship news programmes, before joining the BBC’s Six O’Clock News as part of its main presenter line-up. He also regularly presented for BBC World News.

Alagiah was an accomplished presenter of radio and television documentaries. In 2011 he presented the three-part documentary Mixed Britannia, which charted the long history of dual-heritage relationships and families in the United Kingdom. He also presented documentaries for the BBC World Service’s Assignment stream. In 2010 he was awarded the Outstanding Achievement in Television award at the Asian Awards. He was also a patron of the Fairtrade Foundation and a governor for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2014 he was diagnosed with cancer. He died in 2023 aged 67.