Lyse Doucet

Lyse Doucet is a senior BBC presenter and special correspondent from New Brunswick, Canada. She works for both BBC World Service radio and BBC World News television, and also reports for BBC Radio 4 and BBC News in the UK, including reporting on Newsnight.

Doucet was born in Bathurst, New Brunswick, Canada. Her sister is Andrea Doucet. She has a Master's degree in International Relations from the University of Toronto and a Bachelor of Arts Honours Degree from Queen's University at Kingston.

She is a fluent speaker of English, French and Persian.  

Doucet joined the BBC in the early 1980s in West Africa, and was based in Abidjan in the Ivory Coast for five years. She reported from Pakistan in 1988, and was based in Kabul from late 1988 to the end of 1989 to cover the Soviet troop withdrawal and its aftermath. She was the BBC Correspondent in Islamabad from 1989 to 1993, also reporting from Afghanistan and Iran. In 1994 she opened the BBC office in Amman, Jordan. From 1995 to 1999 she was based in Jerusalem, travelling across the Middle East. In 1999, she joined the BBC's team of presenters but continues to report from the field.

Lyse Doucet is often deployed to anchor significant news events from the field, and to interview key players. She played a leading role in the BBC's coverage of the "Arab spring", reporting from Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. She has covered all major wars in the Middle East since the mid 1990s. Doucet has been a frequent visitor to Pakistan and Afghanistan since the late 1980s. Her work also focuses on the aftermath of major natural disasters, including the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 which took her to India and Indonesia.

Her first overseas experience was with Canadian Crossroads International, when she volunteered in Côte d’Ivoire in 1982. She is now one of its honorary patrons.^[1] Doucet has been a Council Member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and is currently a Council Member of the International Council for Human Rights Policy (ICHRP) based in Geneva. She is also involved with Friends of Aschiana UK which supports working street children in Afghanistan.

Awards

Lyse Doucet won a Peabody and David Bloom award in 2010 for her film on maternal mortality in Afghanistan, along with producer Melanie Marshall, Shoaib Sharifi, and cameraman Tony Joliffe. She won Best News Journalist at the 2010 Sony Radio Academy Awards.

In 2007, she was named International Television Personality of the Year by the Association for International Broadcasting. She also received the News and Factual award from the organisation Women in Film and Television.

In 2003 she was awarded a Silver Sony Award for News Broadcaster of the Year for her interview with Yasser Arafat in his compound in Ramallah.

In 2002, she was the only journalist to accompany the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, to his brother's wedding, where an assassination attempt was made. She and her team were later nominated for a Royal Television Society Award for their exclusive coverage of the attempt. Doucet last interviewed Ahmed Wali Karzai in April 2011, shortly before his assassination.

Doucet has an honorary doctorate in Civil Law from the University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from University College at the University of Toronto (2009), an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of New Brunswick, and an honorary doctorate in journalism from Université de Moncton.

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