Steve Bradshaw

Steve Bradshaw is an Emmy award-winning British journalist and film-maker. Set against the Belle Epoque and the First World War, Briard is his first published novel - and the first novel about the brave dogs who fought in the trenches 100 years ago. It's also a homage to his own Briard called Eve - here she is looking soulful on the right. Steve was inspired to tell the story in a Briard’s voice by Michael Malpurgo’s wonderful War Horse and by the philosopher Timothy Morton’s now famous dictum – Solidarity with Non-Human People!

Steve's website is at www.steve-bradshaw.com

Steve was educated at Nottingham High School (UK) and left the 6th form early after winning an Exhibition scholarship to Queens’ College Cambridge. He was Features Editor of the university newspaper Varsity. He also edited the arts magazine Granta with (now Professor) Colin MacCabe, and the poetry magazine Solstice which first published Graham Swift.

At 20, Steve joined BBC Radio London at its launch - where his cult show Breakthrough, in the early 1970s, was the UK’s first unscripted and open-ended radio magazine. It featured interviews with rock musicians like Lou Reed and Frank Zappa, writers like J.G.Ballard and David Mercer, and Underground figures like Allen Ginsberg – with live phone-ins to Andy Warhol’s Factory.

Breakthrough launched the broadcasting career of the late Charlie Gillett, the World Music authority, and the influential BBC DJ John Peel, also now sadly departed, said it was the radio show he'd most like to present - he and Steve did swap shows a few times.

Also in the 70s, Steve was London correspondent for New York rock magazine Crawdaddy, a radio critic for The Listener, and had a weekly slot on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week. He wrote the Arts in Society column for the weekly magazine New Society, alongside John Berger and Reyner Banham. In 1978 Weidenfeld & Nicolson published his historical memoir, Cafe Society. He remains a failed barista and coffee obsessive.

Steve worked for BBC Current Affairs radio and TV as a globetrotting correspondent and investigative journalist for 40 years. He helped start BBC Radio One’s Newsbeat, BBC Radio Four’s investigative show File on Four, and BBC Radio’s first environmental magazine Groundswell. He was one of the anchors on the news analysis magazine Newsweek on BBC TV 2, and worked as a correspondent for the channel's Newsnight from its inception.

For over two decades he reported from across the world for BBC 1’s flagship current affairs program Panorama, still one of the world's two longest-running TV shows. His work was among the first to highlight climate change, globalization and inequality.

From 2000 onward, Steve was executive producer of TVE's series Life, Life on the Edge and City Life, broadcast on BBC World TV, and Life Apps, broadcast on Al Jazeera.

Steve’s most recent documentary is Anthropocene, the first feature film about humanity’s new epoch. Screened from 2015 at events and film festivals worldwide, the film - according to H-Net - struck a chord with the public at large: “The more people watch this film and join the global discussion, the more progress we will be able to make, and the more hope we will have.” An independent production, Anthropocene was listed by Earth.Com as one of the Top Ten documentaries about planet Earth.

Steve has presented, written, directed or edited over 200 longform radio and TV documentaries, winning - inter alia - Amnesty, Emmy, Peabody and International Investigative Journalism awards. In 2002 he was invited to join the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)– “the Jedi Knights of Investigative Journalism” - and helped pioneer the co-operative model behind subsequent revelations such as the Panama Papers.

Steve has been married for over 40 years to former TV producer Jenny Richards. They have three children - two sons and a daughter - and two grandchildren. Now based in rural Norfolk, UK, they live with Eve, a Poodle called Macy, and many other animals mostly named after musicians. Steve and Jenny's out-of-control garden has been profiled in the Daily Telegraph and in a cover story in Gardens Illustrated. Eve is named after the celebratory song by the Traffic's Jim Capaldi.