Afua Hirsch


Afua Hirsch 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.

Early and personal life

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, 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.
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. She qualified as a barrister in 2006 and trained at Doughty Street Chambers.
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.

Career

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 Guardians West Africa correspondent, based in Accra, Ghana. From 2014 to 2017, she was the Social Affairs and Education Editor at Sky News.
She currently presents her own show on LBC radio.
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.

''Guardian'' article about Nelson's Column

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.
Not long afterward, the art historian and former museum director Sir Roy Strong said the suggestion the column should be taken down was a "ridiculous" viewpoint, commenting that "Once you start rewriting history on that scale, there won't be a statue or a historic house standing....The past is the past. You can't rewrite history".
The following May, Hirsch said the idea of removing Nelson's Column distracted from her main point that Britain should look more carefully at its past to understand itself better today. In an article introducing her television documentary, The Battle for Britain's Heroes, Hirsch stated that she "wasn't actually waiting in a bulldozer, ready to storm Trafalgar Square, as some people seemed to believe".

Book: ''Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging''

Hirsch's book Brit: On Race, Identity and Belonging was published by Jonathan Cape in January 2018.

Reactions to ''Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging''

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 after the First World War.

Reaction to ''The Battle for Britain's Heroes''

In his review of the programme, Hugo Rifkind in The Times wrote that the "subtext is often that Hirsch is attacking Britain in even mentioning this stuff", which itself implies, because of her own background that it "is frankly uppity of her", but Hirsch does not let "her views be defined in opposition to those of her detractors".

Books