After a BA Hons in Scandinavian Studies, Kate Adie launched her BBC career as a station assistant at Radio Durham. She moved to BBC Radio Brighton and then BBC Radio Bristol, where her colleagues included Michael Buerk.

Kate moved to TV news in London, where she covered stories about industrial trouble, weather, race riots, demonstrations, disasters, politics, murder and social unrest, sport and royals - not to mention Miss World, Crufts, pools winners downing champagne and drama productions which had angered Mary Whitehouse.

Kate has travelled extensively during her BBC career. She reported on a series of kidnaps in Sardinia; she was arrested in Belgrade trying to gather material about General Tito. She reported from the Balkans again in the early 1990s, from Russia, the United States, Africa, and Northern Ireland. She was with the Coalition forces as they chased Saddam Hussein's troops out of Kuwait in 1991. The two foreign assignments she's most often associated with are the American bombing of the Libyan capital Tripoli in 1986 and the Chinese authorities' clampdown on dissidents in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in 1989.

She was on duty in London in 1980 when the siege of the Iranian Embassy was brought to an end by the SAS. Her commentary, which interrupted the World Snooker Championships, was heard in millions of homes. It was a marathon broadcast and one for which she had no script.

Today, Kate is the BBC's chief news correspondent. She presents From Our Own Correspondent, reports for BBC World and makes other programmes for Radio 4.

She is also involved with a number of charities and is in demand in Britain and overseas as a public speaker. She has written two books. Her autobiography The Kindness of Strangers was on the best-sellers lists for much of 2003.