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Tim Sebastian, chairman of the worldwide broadcast ‘The New Arab Debates’ is an award-winning BBC foreign correspondent and the first presenter of HARDtalk, the BBC World’s daily half-hour interview programme.
In addition to the Arab Debates, Tim founded & chaired The Doha Debates, broadcasting across the globe on BBC World News from 2004 to 2012. The programmes, recorded in the Gulf state Qatar, provided a unique, uncensored forum for discussing the most controversial issues in the Arab and Islamic worlds.
Mr Sebastian is the winner of the “Richard Dimbleby Award” at BAFTA and named both “Television Journalist of the Year” and “Interviewer of the Year” by the Royal Television Society.
His career began as a foreign correspondent in Warsaw, covering the Solidarity revolution, before becoming the BBC’s Europe Correspondent in 1982, and the Moscow Correspondent in 1984. A year later he was expelled by the Soviet authorities for ‘investigative reasons’.
Born in London in 1952, Tim speaks Russian and German fluently, holds a BA Honours degree in modern languages from Oxford University and is a best-selling author, with eight novels and two non-fiction books to his name. Tim writes widely for newspapers including the Mail on Sunday, The Sunday Times and the New York Times.
Presenting a topical, timely and relevant series of talks, fostering great debates, Mr Sebastian is a world class speaker.