Anna Foster

Anna Foster has presented Radio 4’s flagship Today programme since April 2025. She regularly hosted the BBC News at One and anchors in the field for the BBC News Channel and the BBC News at Six and Ten, which earned her an RTS award nomination in the prestigious ‘Network Presenter of the Year’ category. Before that, she was a Middle East correspondent for the BBC, based in Beirut and reporting from across the region.

As Middle East correspondent, Anna reported from the epicentre of the Turkish earthquake using just a mobile phone, as one of the first journalists on the scene. In recent years she’s covered the events of October 7th and the Israel-Gaza war, the conflict in Ukraine, the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone and the famine in South Sudan. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan she embedded four times with British military forces, and returned to Iraq and Syria years later to report on the humanitarian crisis caused by the rise of the Islamic State group.

She has a strong background in radio, having spent nearly a decade presenting BBC 5 Live Drive and guiding audiences through some of the biggest news and sport stories of recent times. She regularly broadcasts across the BBC, from her former home at Radio 1 Newsbeat to the BBC World Service, as well as writing for the BBC News website. She joined the BBC in April 2002.

Anna is also an award-winning documentary-maker. She won Gold New York Radio Awards for her features 15 Minutes from Mosul and From The Ground Up – both for the World Service – which focussed on the under-reported conflict in the Central African Republic. Her 5 Live team also won the Association of British Science Writers award in 2019 for a special programme on the groundbreaking Women of NASA.