Caroline Wyatt

Caroline Wyatt (born 1967) is the BBC News religious affairs correspondent; until August 2014 she was the defence correspondent. She has been a BBC News journalist for more than 20 years.

Life and career

Wyatt was born in Darlinghurst, a suburb of Sydney, the state capital of New South Wales in the Commonwealth of Australia, and was adopted by a British diplomat. She was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart School (subsequently renamed the Woldingham School), an independent school in Woldingham, Surrey, England. She then went on to study English and German at Southampton University, which also included six months of study at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey at the New Brunswick, New Jersey campus in the U.S.A. After graduating from Southampton, she studied for a post-graduate diploma in print journalism, at the City University, London.

Wyatt joined the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1991 as a news and current affairs trainee. She was based in Germany between 1993 and 2000, first as the Berlin correspondent, then the Bonn correspondent (in the former capital of West Germany). She was then the BBC's Moscow correspondent until 2003, when she became the network's Paris main reporter. She became the BBC defence correspondent in October 2007.

War reporting

Wyatt reported from Baghdad during the December 1998 American bombing campaign of Iraq. She later covered the 1999 Kosovo conflict from both Kosovo and neighboring Albania. Following the "9-11" terrorist attacks on America in 2001, she reported on the U.S. Invasion of Afghanistan during 2001-2002, from the military headquarters of the Afghan Northern Alliance. She also covered the later invasion and subsequent Iraq War (Second Persian Gulf War) in the spring of 2003 as an "embedded journalist" with the British Army troops in and around Basra.

Wyatt chaired the selection jury of the 2008 "Bayeux-Calvados Awards" for war correspondents.

Radio presenting

Wyatt has occasionally presented for BBC Radio on the Radio 4 network programmes "The World Tonight", "From Our Own Correspondent" and the Saturday edition of "PM", as well as "Europe Today", "Newshour" and "Outlook" on the BBC World Service. She has also co-presented "Euronews" on the BBC Radio 5 Live network.