Natasha Kaplinsky - Early Life

Early Life

Kaplinsky's parents are Raphael Kaplinsky, an exiled Jewish South African economics professor at the Open University, and his wife Catherine Kaplinsky née Charlewood, a psychotherapist.

Her paternal grandparents originated from Slonim (then in Poland, now in Belarus), and emigrated to South Africa in 1929. Kaplinsky was born in Brighton, but spent her early life in Kenya (where she claims to have been fluent in Swahili), although she later returned to the United Kingdom, where she was brought up in Barcombe, East Sussex. She attended Ringmer Community College, until the age of sixteen when she moved to Varndean College in Brighton.

After graduating in English from Hertford College, Oxford in 1995, one of her first jobs was working in the press offices of Labour leaders Neil Kinnock and John Smith.

Kaplinsky was the subject of one of a series of BBC television programmes, Who Do You Think You Are?, in which well-known people trace their family trees. Kaplinsky's programme was broadcast on 6 September 2007. She followed her paternal line to Slonim and was shown official documentation relating to her cousin's family. This included the death of family members during the "liquidation" – massacre – of the Slonim ghetto by the Nazis and another's escape to the partisans and eventual emigration to Australia. Her maternal line included an apothecary to King George III.