Alastair Leithead Bio, Wiki
Alastair Leithead whose full name is Alastair Malcolm Leithead is an English award-winning journalist, former BBC foreign correspondent and Virtual Reality filmmaker. He is a former BBC’s Africa Correspondent based in Nairobi, Kenya. He is a blogger at “Off Grid and Ignorant in Portugal”
Alastair Leithead Age
He was born on 21 January 1972 in Amersham. He is 49 years old as of 2021.
Alastair Leithead Education
He attended Newcastle Royal Grammar School before joining The University of Manchester where he graduated in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree in Geography. He later joined Stanford University in California as a JSK (Knight) Fellow, researching new forms of digital storytelling.
Alastair Leithead Parents
He is the son of Arthur Leithead and Edna Mooney Leithead. His father was a security manager while her mother is a teacher in private education.
Alastair Leithead Wife
He is married to Ana Leithead Spross who is a Swedish/Portuguese. The couple lives in rural Portugal where they bought Vale das Estrelas (Valley of the Stars). They have a weekly blog where they document their progress as they settle into Vale das Estrelas (Valley of the Stars) and try to create a new life (and pay the bills) in the Portuguese countryside.
Alastair Leithead BBC
Alastair is a former BBC foreign correspondent. He served as BBC’s Africa Correspondent based in Nairobi, Kenya (August 2015 – August 2019) where he traveled and reported widely across sub-Saharan Africa for the BBC’s TV, radio and digital outlets in the UK and around the world.
Alastair focused on big theme reporting such as Africa’s population growth and radicalization and militarisation in the Sahara. He specializes in conservation issues, such as the connections between wildlife crime and corruption, international criminal syndicates and state capture. In 2017 he won a Foreign Press Association award for his long-read coverage of the Chibok girls’ release in Nigeria.
He joined BBC in August 1996 as a broadcast journalist as Sunderland producer for BBC Radio Newcastle and then moved into TV with Look North and working for Ceefax, Subtitling and News 24 from the Newcastle newsroom.
In June 1998 he began working as a producer on BBC News 24; reporting from TV Centre on a variety of news stories, both domestic and foreign; field producing for home news and working at the BBC World Service newsroom.
In November 2001 he became the Southern Africa correspondent based initially in Cape Town and then Johannesburg, covering news and feature stories mainly in southern Africa, but including trips to Sierra Leone, Liberia for the overthrow of Charles Taylor, Nigeria & Kenya. Covering HIV/AIDS stories across southern Africa, political crisis in Madagascar, and Zimbabwe through a series of undercover assignments.
He later became the Miami correspondent where he covered Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. He also served as the Afghanistan correspondent (April 2006 – October 2008) based in Kabul. During his tenure, he covered the resurgence of the Taliban, followed the British forces closely as they entered Helmand and encountered strong resistance, and traveled widely across Afghanistan unilaterally and on 26 separate embeds with NATO forces to the front lines.
In February 2009 he was posted to Asia as a correspondent for BBC News covering East Asia with undercover trips into Burma. He covered the Japanese tsunami and the “red shirt” demonstrations in Bangkok. He also traveled to Egypt during the Arab Spring. In June 2011 he became the US West Coast correspondent based in LA.
Prior to joining BBC he was a trainee reporter for the Newcastle Evening Chronicle and then became a senior reporter on the paper.
Alastair Leithead Net worth
Leithead has an estimated net worth of between $1 Million to $5 million which he earned from his occupation as Journalist.
https://twitter.com/aleithead
