Menu Close

Shaimaa Khalil

Shaimaa Khalil is an award-winning journalist who has worked for the BBC for more than ten years. She’s Egyptian-British and has vast experience in international news reporting.

In the summer of 2011, while she was covering the Arab Spring in her home country Egypt, Shaimaa was detained by the military in Tahrir Square.

In 2012 she was appointed as the BBC World Service Middle East Regional Editor. Since then, she has reported across the Middle East, including in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan.

Shaimaa Khalil
Shaimaa Khalil

In 2013 she was appointed as lead presenter on BBC World Service Radio’s morning news programme ‘Newsday’.

In 2014, Shaimaa was appointed as the BBC’s Pakistan Correspondent. During her two years in the country, she reported on the some of the biggest news stories there including the Peshawar school massacre. She also reported from neighbouring Afghanistan during that period.  In the same year she won the AIB award for International Radio Personality of the Year.

In 2016 Shaimaa was part of the BBC team reporting on the start of the military campaign to liberate Mosul from ISIS. She was also one of the main presenters covering US Elections 2016.

Between 2017 and 2019 Shaimaa went back to London and resumed her role as one of the lead presenters on the BBC World Service’s morning news program, ‘Newsday’, the world’s biggest breakfast news program.

Shaimaa has since relocated to Sydney where she is currently deployed as the BBC’s Australia correspondent, also covering New Zealand.

Runaways cover

Shaimaa’s first book, Runaways, a dual narrative memoir written with Shelley Davidow will be published by Ultimo Press in 2022. Runaways tells a story of an improbable female friendship between two women from either ends of Africa. Traversing issues of race and religion, family and friendship, this is a poetic, timely and vitally important story told by two women whose friendship transcends historical, social, geographical and temporal boundaries.