Reeta Chakrabarti: 'I went from watching the moon landings on the news as a girl to becoming a BBC journalist - and now I've written my first novel'

With the 2020 Covid lockdowns, it was “now or never”. Chakrabarti was a key worker throughout the pandemic, but away from the job, she at last found time to craft her ideas. The result is Finding Belle, a coming of age novel about the ties that bind and the truths that set us free, all set against the backdrop of Mombasa, Kolkata, and England. It is a story of mothers and daughters, of migration and its complexities, of betrayal, and of a child who must forge her own identity.

"Writing it was very liberating,” says Chakrabarti, who is now working on a second, unrelated, novel. “It probably took me a little bit of time to let go of certain journalistic practices. Of course the novel is fiction and journalism is fact but broadcast news particularly is written in quite a pithy way, with short sentences, all about clarity. I learnt to enjoy the fact I could play with language in my novel, use irony, suggestions, suspense, hinting. And I could use vocabulary I’d never dream of using on the TV.”

A special launch of the book took place last month at York St John University, where Chakrabarti has been Chancellor since 2020. She’ll be back in Yorkshire on July 6, for an event at Bradford Literature Festival. She and award-winning novelist Martina Devlin will be discussing the lasting legacy of Charlotte Brontë and how her life and work continue to inspire modern fiction and shape powerful narratives of resilience and self-discovery.

Chakrabarti was eight-years-old when she stumbled across Brontë’s Jane Eyre. She used to read a lot of Enid Blyton - and Brontë’s work was close by in the library. “I was really taken by little Jane who was lonely, neglected, lost, unloved. I remember writing about it at school,” she says. “Jane Eyre is a novel that I’ve probably read in every decade of my life and my attitude to it and the characters has changed over the years and in a way Finding Belle is my 21st century response to a 19th century novel. If people haven’t read Jane Eyre, don’t be put off as my novel is not in any sense a retelling, it’s independent, but if you have read it, there’ll be some resonances in there that the reader will recognise.”

Chakrabarti’s love for reading began in childhood, whilst growing up in Birmingham. She was “a stereotypical bookworm”, always curled up engrossed in a fictitious world, or writing little stories and plays. She had been born in London, and lived for a short time in Hull, before moving to the West Midlands. Part of her youth was also spent in India, from where her parents had migrated in the early 1960s. Her dual culture and identity has “absolutely defined me”, she says.

She believes Britain today is “very different” to how it was in the Seventies, mostly for the better. “I’m not saying racism has disappeared from Britain,” she said in a recent interview. “It hasn’t, but in the Seventies, I would be teased for having a name like Chakrabarti and now it’s become part of the national fabric. Isn’t that just absolutely brilliant? That makes me so pleased, not for myself, but for us as a country.”

Even in teenagehood, Chakrabarti says she felt journalism would be a “good fit” for her. She had been a “restless child”, with travel to and from India opening her eyes to the wider world. She wanted a job that reflected that. “I’d always been interested in news and current affairs and there was always news in our household,” she says. “One of my very early memories, which must have been when I was in Hull, was the very first moon landings in 1969 when I was four-and-a-half. I remember distinctly my father sitting me down in front of this little black and white TV and saying you must watch this, you will always remember it. And I do!”

Perhaps, even then, a seed had been planted. Years later, Chakrabarti made forays into student journalism, whilst reading English and French at Exeter College, Oxford. She later began her broadcast career in radio, producing and then reporting, and by 1997, she was in front of TV cameras as the BBC’s community affairs correspondent and later spent time covering politics and education.

During her career, Chakrabarti has covered the Stephen Lawrence inquest and subsequent public inquiry, as well as reporting on several general elections, the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean and human trafficking in Albania. In 2018, she was made an Honorary Graduate of York St John, receiving a Doctor of Letters for her inspirational work, and she later became the University’s second Chancellor, following the 13-year tenure of Dr John Sentamu.

The release of her debut novel at 60 isn’t the first time the newsreader has squashed the so-called age barrier. After years as a correspondent, she became a presenter on BBC News at 49 and in recent years she’s reported on numerous conflicts, including travelling to Jerusalem after the Hamas attacks on Israel in 2023. She also visited Lviv just weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

“When I arrived, initially it was almost like the country was just going about its daily business, but things were very far from normal,” she recalls. “When you looked around, public buildings were boarded up in case of air strikes, statues and monuments were covered with a great big tarpaulin so that if they were bombed, the pieces wouldn’t injure people and also so they could be reconstructed afterwards. There were road blocks everywhere.

"In the second week I was there, there were air raid sirens every single night and we’d all get up at two in the morning and rush downstairs and sit in the bunker - a little fortified cellar – for a couple of hours until the danger had passed. It was a country filled with rage and defiance. People had adapted to what was happening and were contributing to the war effort in every single way that they could…It was full of individual stories of defiance and bravery.”

Telling such stories and capturing what life is like for people caught up in the middle of these conflicts, is a role she doesn’t take lightly, one she finds both important and humbling. As for sharing news with the nation, “You have to enjoy it, because otherwise, it would destroy you, wouldn’t it?,” she recently said. “It’s quite pressurised.”

- Finding Belle by Reeta Chakrabarti is out now. She is at Bradford Literature Festival on July 6, in the Ballroom at Bradford Live, at 12:15pm. Visit bradfordlitfest.co.uk