Bridget Kendall

Bridget Kendall MBE (born 27 April 1956 in Oxford, United Kingdom) is a diplomatic correspondent for the BBC, a post that she has held since November 1998. Her father was David George Kendall, a well-known British statistican.

Bridget was educated at the Perse School for Girls, Cambridge. She read modern languages at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, spending two years in Russia on British Council Scholarships in 1977 and 1982. Her postgraduate Soviet Studies took her from St Antony's College, Oxford, to Harvard University, where she spent two years as a Harkness Fellow in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

She joined the BBC in 1983 as a radio production trainee for BBC World Service. She was the BBC's Moscow correspondent from 1989 to 1995 and then the Washington correspondent from 1994 to 1998.

She was in Moscow to witness the power struggles in the Soviet Communist party as Mikhail Gorbachev tried to introduce reform, reported on the break-up of the Soviet Union and the subsequent internal conflicts in Chechnya, Georgia and Tadjikistan. She sent eyewitness reports of the dramatic coup in August 1991 and later covered Boris Yeltsin's rise to power.

Bridget has interviewed several world leaders including President Vladimir Putin live in Russia from the Kremlin as part of a worldwide internet webcast in March 2001.

Later in 2001 she interviewed King Abdullah of Jordan for a tri-media event for the BBC and hosted a similar event in Moscow with former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in 2002.

She was the first woman to win the coveted James Cameron Award for distinguished journalism in 1992 for her reports on events in the former Soviet Union. Later that year, she won a Bronze Sony Radio Award for Reporter of the Year and was made an MBE in the 1994 New Year's Honours list.

References

• BBC Press Office Profile: Bridget Kendall.