Jenni Murray

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jenni Murray OBE (born Jennifer Susan Bailey on 12 May 1950 in Barnsley, Yorkshire) is a British journalist and broadcaster. She attended Barnsley Girls High School and has a degree in French and Drama from Hull University. Early in her career she worked for BBC Radio Bristol and the local news programme South Today and was a newsreader and later one of the presenters of the BBC's Newsnight programme for two years from 1983. She took elocution lessons after leaving university, but retains a very faint Yorkshire accent.

Murray, a radical feminist ^[1], is currently best known as a presenter on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour, which she joined in 1987. She also presents Radio 4's The Message, and was formerly a presenter on the Today programme. In 1999 she was appointed an OBE for services to broadcasting.

Murray is also a patron of the Family Planning Association and vice president of the Parkinson's Disease Society.

On December 21, 2006, Jenni Murray announced at the end of Woman's Hour that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She informed her audience that her prognosis was good; she did indeed return early in 2007. She reported that the most emotionally upsetting moment was losing her hair, and used this as an item on the centrality of hair to definitions of femininity [1].

In November 2007 it was announced that Jenni had become the Patron of British medical research charity, Breast Cancer Campaign. [2]