Frank Gardner OBE
Frank Gardner OBE is to be awarded a Doctor of Laws (LLD) on Friday 4 July 2025 during the afternoon ceremony.
Broadcaster and author Frank Gardner is the BBC’s full-time Security Correspondent reporting on events ranging from Afghanistan to piracy off the Somali coast and Arctic challenges.
Awarded an OBE by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 2005, Frank is the author of four bestselling books Blood and Sand, about his experiences in the Middle East, Far Horizons, which describes unusual journeys to unusual places, Crisis, his debut spy thriller set in Colombia, and his latest thriller, Ultimatum.
Inspired to travel to remote places from an early age after a chance meeting with the veteran Arabian explorer, Sir Wilfred Thesiger, Gardner developed a fascination for the Arab world and was determined to read Arabic at university.
After living with an Egyptian family in the back streets of Cairo, an experience he describes fondly in Blood and Sand, he graduated from Exeter University with a degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies. He embarked on a nine-year career as an investment banker with Saudi International Bank and then Robert Fleming Bank from 1986 until 1995. Bored of banking, he took the plunge into journalism, working initially for BBC World TV.
Spotting a gap in coverage he moved himself and his heavily pregnant wife to Dubai in 1997 to set up as a freelance Gulf stringer covering all six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and Yemen.
In 1999, Gardner was appointed BBC Middle East correspondent in charge of the bureau in Cairo but travelled throughout the region.
After the September 2001 attacks on New York, Gardner focused on stories related to the so-called ‘War on Terror’, a phrase he always disliked, working to steer his audiences away from many of the prejudices and stereotyping that sprang up in the wake of those attacks.
On 6 June 2004, while reporting from a suburb of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Gardner was shot six times and seriously injured in an attack by al-Qaeda sympathisers. His colleague, Irish cameraman Simon Cumbers, was shot dead. Gardner was left partly paralysed in the legs and dependent on a wheelchair for life.
After 14 operations, seven months in hospital and months of rehabilitation he returned to reporting for the BBC in the middle of 2005, using a wheelchair or a frame.