Sue Woodford-Hollick, Lady Hollick

Susan Mary Woodford-Hollick, Baroness Hollick, OBE (born 16 May 1945 for Granada TV and founding commissioning editor of Multicultural Programmes for Channel Four. As a campaigner for human rights, world health, literacy, and the arts, she serves as trustee or patron of a range of charities and foundations. She is founder and co-director of Bringing up Baby Ltd, a childcare company. Other causes and organisations with which she is associated include the African Medical and Research Foundation, Complicité theatre company, Reprieve, the Free Word Centre, the Runnymede Trust and the SI Leeds Literary Prize. Of English and Trinidadian heritage, she is married to Clive Hollick, Baron Hollick, with whom she has three daughters.

Early life Sue Woodford-Hollick was educated at the University of Sussex and is the daughter of Ulric Cross, a former High Court judge in Trinidad, Trinidadian High Commissioner to London (1990–93) and much-decorated RAF squadron leader in World War II (who inspired the 2018 film Hero by Frances-Anne Solomon). On BBC Woman's Hour on 8 August 2012, in the feature "Family Secrets" for which she was interviewed by her daughter Abigail, Woodford-Hollick spoke about growing up believing that she had been adopted by the white parents she knew as "Auntie May and Uncle Dick", only to discover in her twenties that her natural father was a Caribbean war hero and that her much older "sister" was in fact her mother, who had been forced to marry someone else: "Illegitimacy was not accepted in those days, and prejudice against black people was rife everywhere." Woodford-Hollick contributed the memoir "Who I Was Then and Who I Am Now" to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.

Career In 1969, Woodford-Hollick joined Granada Television in Manchester as a newsreader and presenter/reporter on the regional news magazine programme, and she went on to become one of the few women to produce/direct the flagship current affairs programme World in Action.

In 1981, she joined Channel 4 Television as the first Commissioning Editor for multi-cultural programming, one of the priorities of the new channel, where she commissioned a range of programmes to reflect the diversity of Britain's minority ethnic communities. Her work at Channel 4 was described by Farrukh Dhondy as "revolutionary".

Consultancy and voluntary work She has been involved throughout her life with many campaigns for human rights and diversity. of which she remains a patron. and to chair its London regional council, which she did for seven years. She has also served on the boards of a wide range of organisations, including Talawa Theatre Company, the Theatre Museum, Africa's largest health NGO, based in Nairobi, Kenya. She chairs the Leader's Quest Foundation and has served as a trustee of Complicite theatre company and of Reprieve. She is also a patron of the Runnymede Trust and a trustee of the Free Word Centre.

In April 2012, in Port of Spain, Trinidad, she announced the inauguration of the Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize, sponsored by the Hollick Family Charitable Trust and the Arvon Foundation, in association with the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, an award to allow a Caribbean writer living in the Anglophone region and writing in English, and who has not yet published a full-length book, to devote time to advancing a work in progress.

She was named as one of the supporters of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2013.

She is a trustee of the foundation announced in December 2014 in memory of cultural theorist Stuart Hall.

Personal life She is married to the businessman Clive Hollick, Baron Hollick, with whom she has three daughters. Finch has spoken of meeting his father for the first time, when in his forties.

Honours and awards She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to the arts. She is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Westminster and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

In January 2018, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Sussex.

She is an honorary fellow of Merton College, Oxford.