Sally Sara

Sally Jane Sara (born ) is an Australian journalist, TV presenter, author, and playwright. She has worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for many years, including stints as foreign correspondent in Africa, South Asia, and Afghanistan.

Sara currently hosts Radio National Breakfast on ABC Radio National.

Early life and education Sally Jane Sara on the Yorke Peninsula in South Australia. Her grandmother was a singer, and acted in local plays and school productions, and her mother also acted in amateur productions. Her mother would take her to the city (Adelaide) to see plays while her father took her brothers camping. She developed a love of theatre, and wanted to be a playwright when she was young.

Sara is a graduate of the University of Adelaide, staying in the residential college of St Mark's in North Adelaide from 1988 until 1990.

Career In the year after graduation, Sara wrote to the producers of the long-running TV series A Country Practice, asking for an opportunity to do some writing for the show, and was able to write a trial script in their Sydney writing room. She also worked in Alice Springs, Adelaide, Melbourne, and Canberra.

In November 2008 she took up the post as the ABC's South Asia correspondent based in New Delhi, India. She worked largely on her own while there. In a society segregated by gender, Sara said that being a female reporter allowed her "to have access to women to be able to tell their stories – and that's really important. In a place like Afghanistan women and children make up almost three quarters of the population so it's crucial that their voices are heard." After almost twelve years as a foreign correspondent,

In October 2016, the ABC announced that Sara was returning to Africa as the broadcaster's Africa correspondent, based in Nairobi, Kenya.

She has reported from more than 40 countries,

From 2020 until the end of 2024 she presented The World Today, a weekday radio current affairs program on ABC Radio.

Other activities Sara has written for the Boston Globe and The New York Times. She also contributed a chapter in Travellers' Tales Stories from ABC TV's Foreign Correspondents, published in 2004.

Sara is the author of the book Gogo Mama, which tells the diverse stories of 12 women from different African countries.

In February 2013, Sara released the first of a 12-part online series called Mama Asia on the ABC website, inspired by Gogo Mama. She spent a week with most of the women featured in the project, getting to know them and their families. It developed into a television series so that it could include photography and audio. It is a long-form journalism series. Sara interviewed an Afghan helicopter pilot, Latifa Nabizada; a pioneering Thai Buddhist monk, Bhikkhuni Dhammananda; a South Korean leprosy sufferer; a sheep shearer from beyond the Gobi Desert; a matriarch from the slums of Mumbai; a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bomb; Filipina human rights activist and rape survivor Hilda Narciso; and the survivor of an acid attack in Bangladesh. The women's stories were published each month beginning from February 2013 to December 2013. after five years in the writing. The story begins in Kabul, where the lead character is a war correspondent, and moves to Sydney. In researching for the show, Sara interviewed all the real people who inspired the characters in her play, which, she said, gave greater depth to her writing. About the play, she said "The play wasn't so much therapy as a way of reclaiming the events, turning an awful experience into something positive". was awarded the Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship for human rights journalism,

Sara was recognised by St Mark's College as a Distinguished Collegian in 2012, and in September of that year was named as an Ochberg Fellow at the Dart Centre at Columbia University in New York.

Sara has won many awards in her career, both domestic and international, starting with a few in her first job at Outback Radio 2WEB, She has also won a second Walkley, for radio reporting. her book Gogo Mama was nominated for the best non-fiction book in the Walkley Awards. In April 2011, Sara was awarded the Silver Medal at the New York Festivals Television and Film Awards Gala at the NAB Show in Las Vegas for her story "Standing on the Sky".

In October 2016, Sara was named as a finalist for the 6th AACTA Awards for her story on #BlackLivesMatter.

She has also been nominated twice for the Graham Perkin Award.

Personal life Sara is a state Masters Athletics champion, and won a silver medal at the Australian Masters Athletics Championships in 2007.

Sara has a younger brother, Tyson, a defence industry strategist who happened to be in Afghanistan at the same time she was there.

To help her recover from the trauma of what she experienced while in Kandahar, Afghanistan, she consulted a psychologist specialising in trauma therapy for several years after her return.

She speaks Zulu. She is a friend of journalist Leigh Sales.