From Facts to Fiction, Richmond Magazine, November, 2025

Reeta Chakrabarti has presented the news for years. Now she is making it herself with her debut novel. Deana Luchia is ready to read

When Reeta Chakrabarti walks into a café next to Broadcasting House, the historic BBC headquarters on London’s Portland Place, I recognize her at once. No wonder. She has, after all, been presenting news bulletins on our screens since 2014.

We’ve chosen the cafe for its proximity to the studios. After we’ve finished chatting about her debut novel, Finding Belle – about which she will speaking at this month’s Arts Richmond Literature Festival – the broadcaster will head into the Art Deco building to prepare for tonight’s BBC News at Six.

She’s worked at the BBC for over 30 years, as a journalist and correspondent, as well as a presenter. But for someone who has spent most of her working life dealing with facts about politics, conflicts and crime, her choice of fiction for a literary debut is perhaps a little surprising. Not for her the career memoir, like fellow BBC journalists Jon Sopel and Emily Maitlis. So what made her decide on a novel?

“If I was going to write a book, it was always going to be fiction,” she tells me,

sipping her peppermint tea. “It’s a desire I’ve always nursed: I was a bookworm

as a child, I did an English [and French] degree [at Oxford], there were lots of

books in our house and we were quite a literary family. I always wanted to write

something but circumstances conspired against it.”

Everything changed with lockdown.

“I was still working – newsreaders were seen as key workers – but I wasn’t doing anything else and so I had a lot more time. I thought that if I didn’t write a book then, I never would.”

Finding Belle tells the story of Mivvi, a mixed race girl growing up in 1970s Milton Keynes. Whilst attempting to make sense of her parents’ troubled relationship, Mivvi becomes increasingly vulnerable to the violent mood swings of her mother, Belle.

And so the story examines mother-daughter relationships and dysfunctional families, as well as mental illness and cultural identity.

Happily, Mivvi is not Reeta. Unlike many first novels, whose authors fictionalise their own lives (or parts thereof) for the purpose, Finding Belle is no auto-biography in disguise. Even so, says Reeta, she did draw on some of her memories of growing up in the 70s.

Born in London to Indian immigrants, Reeta spent most of her childhood in Birmingham where, much like Mivvi, she was subjected to racist taunts at school.

“The 1970s was a harsher, cruder place when it came to race,” she says. “I don’t think we were as comfortable in our diversity as we are now. I’m not saying there aren’t still tensions – of course there are – but broadly speaking it’s a much more

comfortable time.

“I don’t want to make too much of it, but people of my age [Reeta is 60 but looks decades younger], when they talk about their experiences growing up, they all say the same thing: as the child of immigrants, you felt like you were standing out. And there was also a big onus on you to assimilate. I feel that young people now are more able to be who they are than we were.”

Memories of Kolkata also work their way into the novel: Reeta’s parents are from the city (Calcutta, as it was then) and she attended an International School there when she was 15.

“I really enjoy visiting. I have uncles, aunts and cousins there, and so a lot of my book is very much my accumulated feelings about the city.”

Belle, the book’s eponym, is clinically mentally unwell. Reeta writes about her

illness in an authentic and sympathetic way. What inspired her to create such a

character?

“Jane Eyre,” she says. “When I was much younger I was interested in Jane’s time at school – her loneliness, the way she was neglected. Then, as I got older, it was the great romance between Jane and Rochester that most fascinated me. Later still I started to realise what a bastard Rochester is because he locks up Bertha [his first wife] in the attic.

“And so my book is, in a way, a 21st century response to a 19th century novel. The way that Bertha is treated is very much as if she’s not a person. She’s referred to repeatedly as the lunatic. She’s a dark, aggressive, violent presence. I wanted to take some of that violence and put it into my depiction of Belle, but with much more sympathy.”

We talk about presenting the news – whether on the ground as a correspondent

or in the studio – and the importance of showing empathy without letting

personal emotions get in the way.

“The main point is to give people information,” says Reeta. “You want people to watch and listen, not turn off. Stories do get to us, but you don’t show it at work. There is no point. There’s a huge difference between personal emotion and empathy. You have to calibrate it right.”

She describes reading the news as “holding the viewer’s hand” as she talks

them through the day’s events.

There are now four hours before she’s on air. What will she do during that time?

“Talk to the editor of the day about the stories and the running order – what we expect to change, whether there is any jeopardy around the filing of a particular story – and then I’ll start writing. Headlines first and then the introductions to each

story we’re covering.

“I get a sort of skeleton [of facts] to flesh out, fact check and put into my style, as each of us has a slightly different way. I write short, pithy sentences. For me, clarity

is everything. You only have one chance to get the news across, so it’s got to be clear first time.”

I ask about her writing schedule. She doesn’t have a daily word count, she says, or a best time of day for writing.

“I might be between bulletins, or sitting on the Northern line, thinking about what a character would say.”

Her husband, English professor Paul Hamilton, whom she met when they were students, is the first person with whom she shares new work.

“He’s very helpful; a clever and considered critic. Quite gentle too, which is just as well, as he’s my husband.”

One last question. I know she has a two-book deal with HarperCollins, so what is her second book about?

“I can’t tell you,” she smiles. “I am terribly superstitious. All I will say is that it’s about an artist.”

Finding Belle by Reeta Chakrabarti is published by HarperCollins. Reeta

will be at Arts Richmond Literature

Festival at The Exchange, Twickenham

on Nov 26 (7.30pm). Tickets £14;

artsrichmond.org.uk

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This article originally appeared in the November 2025 issue of Richmond Magazine.