Journalist Kate Adie to receive Bafta Fellowship

Kate Adie is to receive the Bafta Fellowship

Kate Adie will receive the Bafta Fellowship at this year's British Academy Television Awards in May.

The journalist and author is receiving the award to recognise her contribution to television and the arts.

The fellowship is given out every year with past recipients including Dawn French, Michael Palin and Jon Snow.

Adie said: "It's lovely to be awarded the Bafta Fellowship. I feel very honoured."

Jane Lush, Chair of Bafta, said: "Kate Adie is a truly ground-breaking news journalist, being one of a very small number of women working to report the news from hostile environments around the world.

"We are delighted to be celebrating her stellar career at this year's ceremony; she is a true trailblazer and very deserving of the Fellowship Award."

Adie started her career working in local radio at Radio Durham and then BBC Radio Bristol.

She then moved on to TV news in London and her live report in 1980, marking the end of the siege of the Iranian Embassy, was viewed by millions after it interrupted the World Snooker Championships.

Adie became chief news correspondent for the BBC in 1989, holding the post for 14 years and saw her reporting from conflicts around the world, including both Gulf Wars and war in the Balkans.

Adie also memorably covered the uprising of Chinese students in Tianenmen Square. She was the only correspondent to report from the streets of Beijing on the gunfire and violence as hundreds were massacred in the 1989 events.

Adie reporting from near Tiananmen Square in 1989

She later said she felt duty bound to stay - despite the risk to her - and her cameraman's - personal safety. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph nearly ten years ago, she said: "I felt it hugely that night, more so than I would normally feel.

"It was partly because we had seen only one other cameraman. The second thing was that we knew that within China the habit would be that they would rewrite history or possibly deny it. So we knew we had to get some evidence.'

It was to be one of the most important and distressing reports Adie filed during her years at the BBC.

The 72-year-old now presents Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent and is a contributor to many other radio and television programmes.

Adie has won several awards including the Richard Dimbleby Award at the British Academy Television Awards in 1990 and three Royal Television Society awards.