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 and magazine journalism, at the City University, London. While there, she received a sponsorship from the Royal Academy of Chartered Surveyors Journals doing an attachment to their magazine "Chartered Surveyors Weekly".

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 business reporter, then Berlin correspondent in the reunified German capital at the time of the withdrawal of both Russian and British occupation armies from divided Berlin and the 50th Anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where she found out that her grandfather had been held prisoner during World War II. Wyatt then became the Bonn correspondent on the Rhine River (in the former capital of West Germany). She was then the BBC's Moscow correspondent in Russia until 2003, when she became the network's main reporter in Paris, France. She then 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 in the Balkins peninsula of southeastern Europe, from both Kosovo and neighboring Albania. Following the "9-11" (September 11th) 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 began doing radio work for "Newsroom Southeast" and the local station in Birmingham. Later she 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.