Samira Ahmed was born on 15 June 1968 in Wandsworth, London, to Athar and Lalita Ahmed. Her mother worked in broadcasting and Indian cookery media, influencing Samira’s interest in journalism. She attended Wimbledon High School and studied English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, winning journalism prizes, later completing a postgraduate diploma in newspaper journalism at City University, London.

Ahmed began her career as a BBC news trainee in 1990, reporting on major programmes including Today and Newsnight, and served as the BBC’s Los Angeles correspondent in 1996-97. She also worked briefly for Deutsche Welle in Berlin before returning to the BBC.

In 2000 she joined Channel 4 News, becoming a presenter, and earned the Stonewall Broadcast of the Year Award in 2009 for a film on corrective rape in South Africa. Since returning freelance to the BBC in 2011, she has anchored Newswatch, presented Front Row and hosted documentaries such as Art of Persia on BBC Four.

A recent interview seems to indicate that she has divorced her husband, Brian Millar with whom she shares two children, a son and a daughter.