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Kate Adie OBE | Fellowship 2018

Kate Adie OBE was honoured with the Fellowship, the highest honour BAFTA can bestow, at the 2018 Virgin TV British Academy Television Awards. The broadcast journalist and author received the award in recognition of an outstanding and exceptional contribution to television.


The following is an extract from the official 2018 Virgin TV British Academy Television Awards brochure. Our press release announcing the news can be found here.

It’s a great honour. You don’t come into journalism expecting these things

It is unlikely that any other recipient of a BAFTA Fellowship bears as many scars of war as Kate Adie OBE – and carries them so lightly. She has been shot four times but, as she says, “Little bits are missing, nothing vital.” Reporting for the BBC, she was grazed by a bullet in Beirut and hit by shrapnel in Bosnia, which is still inside her. She had flesh torn from her elbow in Tiananmen Square by a bullet that killed the man next to her and was shot at close range in Libya.

Adie survived and receives this year’s Fellowship in recognition of her trailblazing career as a news correspondent. “It’s a great honour. You don’t come into journalism expecting these things,” she says…

Adie describes her job as that of an “an eyewitness reporter”. She is adamant that a journalist should never become the story: “It is utterly irrelevant what the reporter thinks. You’re putting out information for people to make up their own mind.”

On the battlefield, says Adie, fear is a constant but necessary companion: “If there’s one sort of colleague you never want to stand next to, it is one who never feels danger. I’ve met immensely brave people and they all know what fear is.”

Read the full feature on p.34 of the brochure >

Event: Virgin TV British Academy Television AwardsDate: Sunday 13 May 2018Venue: Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Rd, Lambeth, LondonHost: Sue Perkins-Area: CeremonyBAFTA/Shutterstock/James Gourley

Words by Matthew Bell | Image by BAFTA/Shutterstock/James Gourley