Of British-Ghanaian heritage, writer and broadcaster Afua was ranked the ninth most influential Briton of African/African-Caribbean heritage in the 2021 Powerlist, having been named one of the 100 most influential in the 2020 Powerlist.
In 2020, New African magazine named Afua as one of the top 100 most influential Africans.
Since moving into journalism, Afua has been Legal Correspondent and then West Africa Correspondent for The Guardian, before becoming Social Affairs and Education Editor for Sky News.
As a new writer, Afua received the Royal Society of Literature’s Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction while writing her first book, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging. She currently holds the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Journalism and Communication at the University of Southern California.
Afua co-presented, alongside Samual L. Jackson, a six-part television documentary series called Enslaved, which explores aspects of the history of the transatlantic slave trade. She also presented the documentary series African Renaissance: When Art Meets Power, during which she visited Ethiopia, Senegal and Kenya, meeting musicians and artists, and recounting each country’s history.
Most recently, she presented the three-part BBC documentary series Africa Rising with Afua Hirsch, exploring how young creatives are reinventing culture across Africa.