Kirsty Lang

Kirsty Lang is an experienced foreign correspondent and broadcaster. She is currently a presenter of BBC Radio’s daily arts programme, Front Row, as well as television anchor on BBC 4 and the BBC World news programmes. Kirsty began her career as a graduate trainee at the BBC before being appointed a reporter on the Today programme. She then worked as a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe based in Budapest, covering the revolutions of 1989 and the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

In the early 1990s, Kirsty became a roving correspondent for Newsnight based in London before being headhunted by the Sunday Times to become their Paris correspondent where she worked for four years, including as the chief correspondent covering the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Channel 4 News brought Kirsty back to London to help relaunch the programme at the beginning of 1999 covering social and political issues within the European Union. The BBC then asked to become the face of BBC 4 International News when it launched. For the last 8 years, she has presented Front Row along with Mark Lawson. 

Kirsty has extensive experience chairing conferences on social, educational and political issues. She has worked for the World Health Organisation in Geneva, chaired events at the annual symposium of the Andreas Papandreou Foundation in Greece and recently chaired a conference on sustainable agriculture in Berlin with representatives of the agro-chemical industry and the Green lobby in an attempt to find common ground on this crucial issue. She has a degree and Masters in International Relations from the London School of Economics and is about to take a sabbatical from the BBC in order to teach one semester in the School of International and Public Affairs at Colombia University in New York starting this January. 

Kirsty chaired the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2008. In 2010, she was a judge on the Independent Prize for Foreign Fiction in Translation. Both prizes have a strong educational and literacy arm. Orange has a campaign to take books into schools, libraries and prisons.  She lives in London and is married to the author and broadcaster, Misha Glenny, and they have one son.