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Presenting

Recent interviews

It’s New Year’s Eve 1972. 8-year-old Jerald Walker peeks anxiously into the dark, convinced the world’s about to end. When it doesn't, he's desperate for something to believe in.

While searching through some boxes, Sophie Parker rediscovered the precious leaf that had given her grandmother courage 80 years earlier as a spy captured during WW2.

Separated from her family and trained as a child soldier, Loung Ung's defiant spirit helped her survive Pol Pot’s regime, which killed nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s population.

Dominic and Justin Hardy were young boys when their father, the director Robin Hardy, began an obsessive quest to make The Wicker Man. The fallout for the family was painful.

When singer Vashti Bunyan released an album in 1970, it flopped and she turned her back on music for good. Decades later, she discovered it had become an underground hit.

Natasha Lance Rogoff’s daunting task of making Sesame Street in post-Soviet Russia. Along the way, she’d face mobsters with shark tanks, bankruptcy, and the kidnapping of Elmo.

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Production

Series and stories I have produced

In 2015 Putin’s number one public enemy, Boris Nemtsov, was shot and killed in front of the Kremlin.His daughter, journalist Zhanna Nemtsova, and co-host Ben Rhodes tell his story to find out what happened to an entire country – and what happens next. Is another Russia possible?

The story of the last Soviet cosmonaut who is trapped on the world's only space station, as the country he knows and loves collapses beneath him.

On February 17th, 2021, in Newport, the family of Mouayed Bashir called 999. His parents reported he was suffering a mental health episode that morning. Nearly three hours later, the 29-year-old was dead after being restrained by police officers in his bedroom.
In this 2-part podcast, I investigated the death of a Black man following police contact, examining the circumstances surrounding this tragedy and raising important questions about police response to mental health crises.

When Lee Solomon set up his funeral home, he had one mission: to give families the sendoff they really wanted. But during the Covid-19 outbreak, that became impossible. For a month, Lee kept an audio diary, chronicling the experience of running a funeral home during the pandemic and the hardships that came with it.

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I'm Asya. An award-winning radio journalist, presenter, and producer. I host Outlook on BBC World Service and its sister podcast Lives Less Ordinary, where I tell human-focused, character-driven stories.Over the past decade, I've produced work for the BBC, Crooked Media, iHeartRadio, and The Times, creating narratives that make sense of both world-shaking events and people's everyday lives. I helped launch The Story, The Times' flagship narrative news podcast, where I reported on the police killing of a young Black man in Wales and produced Diary of a Funeral Director during the pandemic.I've also produced international series like Another Russia and The Last Soviet — ambitious, deeply reported podcasts that reveal how individuals shape and are shaped by seismic historical forces.
In 2021, I won Bronze for Best News Producer at the British Podcast Awards and was nominated again the following year.I grew up between California and the forests of Karelia, Russia — a dual perspective that gives my reporting unexpected angles and cultural context. I'm fluent in Russian which helps navigate stories from multiple viewpoints.Outside the studio, I split my time between Muay Thai training (a long time obsession) and my work as a doula in training, supporting women through childbirth and recovery.

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