Ramita Navai

Ramita Navai is a double Emmy and double Robert F. Kennedy award-winning British-Iranian investigative journalist, documentary maker and author. With a reputation for working in hostile environments, she has reported from over forty countries, made over thirty documentaries and features and worked as a foreign correspondent for print. 

After a Masters in journalism at City University where her graduating film on transsexual legislation in the UK won the national Young Broadcast Journalist of the Year Award, she began her career as the Tehran correspondent for The Times. While in the region, she also reported for The Sunday Times, The Irish Times, RTE radio and many other publications and media outlets, also covering Afghanistan and Pakistan.

She joined Channel 4's Unreported World in 2006, reporting and producing twenty documentaries. Her investigations included blood diamonds in Zimbabwe, sex trafficking in Mexico, the war in South Sudan, child prisoners in Burundi and migrant torture camps in Egypt.

She won an Emmy award for her PBS Frontline documentary Syria Undercover in 2012.

She has made several news features for Channel 4 News, including Tracking down the Refugee Kidnap Gangs which won a Royal Television Society Journalism Award and the Foreign Press Association News Story of the Year Award.

She reported and produced Iraq Uncovered for PBS Frontline and ISIS and the Battle for Iraq for Channel 4’s Dispatches, winning the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the British Journalism Award for Foreign Affairs and the Frontline Club Broadcast Journalism Award. Iraq Uncovered was also nominated for two Emmy awards.

She reported and produced U.N. Sex Abuse Scandal for PBS Frontline, Channel 4's Dispatches and ARTE. It won the Robert. F. Kennedy 2019 Journalism Award for International Television, and was nominated for an Emmy Award.

She reported, produced and directed IRAQ’S ASSASSINS, a PBS Frontline / BBC / ARTE documentary investigating targeted assassinations of activists by militias in Iraq, broadcast in 2021.

She investigated rape cases in India where perpetrators are politicians and their allies, revealing how officials and police cover up their crimes. INDIA’S RAPE SCANDAL (Channel 4 and PBS Frontline) was nominated for a Rose d’Or award and named as one of the top ten TV programmes of 2021 by The Observer.

For her latest documentary she reported and executive produced AFGHANISTAN UNDERCOVER for PBS Frontline and NO COUNTRY FOR WOMEN for ITV (2022). It is the result of a six-months investigation into the Taliban’s treatment of women, exposing mass arrests and abductions. It won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Investigation, a Grierson Award for Best Current Affairs Documentary, a DuPont-Columbia Silver Baton, a Rose d’Or Award and an Overseas Press Club of America Award.

In December 2022 Ramita was awarded the Women in Film and TV News and Factual Award, which recognises outstanding achievement by a woman in this field in the last two years. In 2023 Ramita won the Royal Society of Television Presenter of the Year Award, the Edinburgh TV Festival Best Factual TV Presenter Award and a Gracie Award for International Investigation.

For her latest documentary, she reported from the Occupied West Bank for PBS Frontline.

Ramita guest presented two episodes of the BBC Radio 4 show and podcast One to One, exploring grief with author Richard Osman and neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor. She regularly guest presents the BBC World Service programme Outlook.

She is the creator and host of THE LINE OF FIRE, a podcast about the moment of facing death which made the top 10 in the Apple podcast charts.

Her first book City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran won the Debut Political Book of the Year at the 2015 Political Book Awards, and was awarded the Royal Society of Literature's Jerwood Prize for non-fiction. It has been translated into six languages.

She is a contributing author to Shifting Sands: The Unravelling of the Old Order in the Middle East (published in the UK, US and Turkey).

She is regularly interviewed about her work and has been a guest on many TV and radio shows around the world, including being interviewed about her work and life by NPR’s legendary Terry Gross on the Fresh Air show, by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, NPR’s The World, Sky News, BBC News, CNN, BBC Radio 4’s The Today programme among many others.

She appeared as herself in a scene with Mandy Patinkin in episode 1 of the final series of the TV show Homeland.