Afua Hirsch

Hirsch contributed the piece "What Does It Mean To Be African?" to Margaret Busby's 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa.

She was on the panel of judges for the 2019 Booker Prize for Fiction that made Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo joint winners, causing much controversy. Later that year, Hirsch was included in the 2020 Powerlist of the most influential Britons from African/African-Caribbean heritage.

In the television programme The Battle for Britain's Heroes, first broadcast by Britain's Channel 4 in late May 2018, Hirsch raised lesser-known aspects of the career of former British prime minister Winston Churchill, such as his attitude to Indians and advocacy of gassing "uncivilised tribes" in Mesopotamia (now partly modern day Iraq) after the First World War.

In August 2017, in The Guardian, Hirsch questioned whether Nelson's Column should remain in place, with the implication it might be removed. She argued that the London monument is a symbol of white supremacy because Horatio Nelson opposed the abolitionist movement.

Hirsch has worked in international development, law and journalism. She began working as a lawyer in criminal defence, public and international law. She then became a legal correspondent for The Guardian. She has lived in Britain and Senegal, and served as The Guardian' s West Africa correspondent, based in Accra, Ghana. From 2014 to 2017, she was the Social Affairs and Education Editor at Sky News.

Hirsch was educated at the private Wimbledon High School, and then studied philosophy, politics, and economics at St Peter's College, Oxford. After her graduation with a Bachelor of Arts degree, she took the Graduate Diploma in Law at the BPP Law School. Hirsch met Sam, her partner, while each was pursuing a legal career. He is from Tottenham, north London, and of Ghanaian descent. The couple's daughter was born in 2011.

Afua Hirsch (born 12 June 1981) is a Norwegian-born British writer, broadcaster, and former barrister. She has worked as a journalist for The Guardian newspaper, and was the Social Affairs and Education Editor for Sky News from 2014 until 2017.

Afua Hirsch was born in Stavanger, Norway, to a British father and an Akan mother from Ghana, and was raised in Wimbledon, south London. Her paternal grandfather, Hans (later John), who was Jewish, had fled Berlin in 1938. Her great-uncle is the metallurgist Sir Peter Hirsch. Her maternal grandfather, who graduated from the University of Cambridge, was involved in establishing the post-independence education system in Ghana but later became a political exile.