Stephen Sackur Keynote Speaker

Stephen Sackur was a BBC foreign correspondent for 15 years, based in Cairo, Jerusalem, Brussels and Washington DC.

He presented and hosted the BBC’s flagship current affairs and interview programme HARDtalk for 19 years, until its final programme in 2025.

In his role at HARDtalk, Stephen has conducted many landmark interviews with international personalities including: Al Gore, Hugo Chávez, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Felipe Calderón, Shimon Peres, Mahmoud Abbas, Jalal Talabani and a host of other leaders and politicians from around the world. He has also interviewed leading cultural figures including Gore Vidal, Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky, Anwar Ibrahim, Annie Lennox and Vladimir Ashkenazy.

Prior to taking up his role at HARDtalk, Stephen was a widely followed foreign affairs correspondent covering major stories such as the Velvet Revolution of Czechoslovakia in 1989 and the reunification of Germany in 1990. During the first Gulf War, Stephen was embedded with the British army for eight weeks where he covered the conflict and broke the news of the massacre of the retreating Iraqi army on the road leading out of Kuwait.

Stephen was the BBC’s Chief Washington Correspondent between 1997 and 2002, before returning to Iraq to cover the Second Gulf war in 2003. He has interviewed Presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush, covered the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Over the past 10 years he has established himself as a popular moderator and chair, presenting at international conferences and high profile events around the world – from the IMF in Washington DC to the international climate change summit in Copenhagen.

In June 2017 Sackur was conferred with an Honorary Doctorate of International Relations (DIR) by the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations.