Career
Esler joined the BBC in 1977 as a Northern Ireland reporter, and extended his role after joining Newsnight in 1982. Esler was then appointed Washington correspondent and later chief North America correspondent for the BBC, in charge of shaping coverage across the whole continent for the corporation, and covering both the earlier George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations. His report on the military build up in the Aleutian islands as part of the Reagan administration's New Maritime Strategy earned him a Royal Television Society award.
Esler's reporting extended further across the globe, and he has reported for news and documentary programmes across Europe, Russia, China, and North and South America. In 2007 he won a Sony Gold Award for his radio documentary report on Sami al-Hajj, one of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay. Following the broadcast al Hajj was released from American custody.
Esler combined reporting with presenting from the mid 1980s on BBC One's regional news programme for London and the South East of England - Newsroom South East. He then joined BBC News (then known as "BBC News 24") from its outset, presenting its primetime slot with Sian Williams for several years.
In January 2003 he joined Newsnight, replacing Jeremy Vine, who had left to take over from Sir Jimmy Young on Radio 2. During his career Esler has interviewed heads of state including Bill Clinton, Jacques Chirac and King Abdullah of Jordan. He has also interviewed a wide range of cultural figures including Dolly Parton, Doris Lessing, Penélope Cruz, Angelina Jolie, V. S. Naipaul, Roger Waters, Vikram Seth and Seamus Heaney.
Esler also presents Dateline London on BBC News and BBC World News most Sunday mornings at 11am. He also the Deputy presenter of the BBC News at Five O'Clock on the BBC News channel on Fridays and when Huw Edwards is away. Esler has also hosted Radio 4 factual series, Four Corners along with fellow Scottish broadcaster, Anne MacKenzie.
Esler is the author of five novels - Loyalties, Deep Blue, The Blood Brother, A Scandalous Man, and Power Play. A Scandalous Man was described by fellow author Bernard Cornwell as "a compelling book, its political sophistication made luminous with wisdom sympathy and story telling." Other reviewers were equally complimentary. His fifth novel, Powerplay, was published by HarperCollins in August 2009. Esler has also written a book on American discontent, The United States of Anger, published in October 1997 (Penguin). For several years he wrote regular columns for The Scotsman, The Independent and other publications.
Read more about this topic: Gavin Esler
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)