Afua Hirsch

Afua Hirsch FRSL (born 1981)

Early life Afua Hirsch was born in Stavanger, Norway, to a British father, Peter Hirsch, and a Ghanaian mother, Mary Owusu-Hirsch, and was raised in Wimbledon, southwest London. Her paternal grandfather, Hans (later John), who was Jewish, fled Berlin in 1938. Her great-uncle was 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 (1999–2002). After graduating 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. 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.

Among other publications and outlets for which she has written are The Observer, The Evening Standard, Vogue, and Prospect.

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

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. 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: "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." 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".

Publications Brit(ish)

Hirsch's book Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging was published by Jonathan Cape in January 2018. The book is part-memoir and discusses black history, culture and politics in the context of Britain, Senegal and Ghana. It became a Sunday Times bestseller. Hirsch was awarded a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize for Non-Fiction while writing it in 2016.

Decolonising My Body

Reviewing Hirsch's 2023 book, Decolonising My Body: A Radical Exploration of Rituals and Beauty, Niellah Arboine wrote in The Guardian: "If her first book Brit(ish) was about grappling with her identity as a black British woman of mixed heritage, Decolonising My Body aims to unpack how her identity and wider society have shaped her physically."

Television Hirsch has been a panellist on the Sky News discussion programme The Pledge.

The Battle for Britain's Heroes 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 tear gassing "uncivilised tribes" in Mesopotamia (now partly modern-day Iraq) after the First World War. 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".

Enslaved

Hirsch was co-presenter alongside Samuel L. Jackson of the six-part television documentary series Enslaved, premiered in 2020, which explores aspects of the history of the transatlantic slave trade, including links to her personal history.

African Renaissance: When Art Meets Power In 2020, Hirsch presented the documentary series African Renaissance: When Art Meets Power on BBC Four. Hirsch visited Ethiopia, Senegal and Kenya, meeting musicians and artists, and recounting the history of each country.

In August 2021, it was announced Hirsch's production company Born in Me (its name references a quotation from Kwame Nkrumah: "I am not African because I was born in Africa, but because Africa was born in me") had signed a deal with Fremantle.

Africa Rising with Afua Hirsch In June 2023, Hirsch presented the three-part BBC documentary series Africa Rising with Afua Hirsch exploring how young creatives are reinventing culture across Africa.

Teaching Hirsch holds the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Journalism and Communication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Recognition Hirsch was on the panel of judges for the 2019 Booker Prize for Fiction that, causing much controversy, made Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo joint winners.

Later that year, Hirsch was included in the 2020 edition of the Powerlist of the most influential Britons from African/African-Caribbean heritage.

Hirsch was cited as one of the top 100 most influential Africans by New African magazine in 2020. Furthermore, in the Powerlist 2021, she made the top 10, ranking ninth most influential person of African or African Caribbean heritage in the United Kingdom.

In 2024, Hirsch was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Personal life Hirsch met Sam, her partner, while each was pursuing a legal career. The couple's daughter was born in 2011.