Lukwesa Burak


Lukwesa Burak is a news presenter and former weather presenter for BBC News. Previously, she worked for Al Jazeera English, Sky News and before that Africa Edition on eNCA, based in South Africa. She was formerly a weather forecaster and then news presenter in the United Kingdom, for East Midlands Today, a regional television news programme covering the Midlands area of Central England, followed by news presenter for Sky News, the 24-hour television news service operated by Sky Television, part of British Sky Broadcasting, based in London.
She became a news presenter for eNCA in August 2012. She is a regular presenter of World News Today on BBC Four, BBC World News and the BBC News Channel on as well as afternoons and evenings on Saturdays and Sundays.

Biography

Burak was born in Zambia in 1974, and named after her royal tribal family. She enjoyed animals and had a spider collection. After capsizing on a fishing trip on the Zambezi river with her father she was hospitalised for four weeks, having caught malaria.
Burak's family moved to England when she was aged eight. She had an interest in flying, so joined the Royal Air Force Air Training Corps, but had to leave after injuring her leg during a game of football. She gained a bachelor's degree in Geography and European Studies at the University of Sussex, when she spent a year in Switzerland and learned to speak French. She was then awarded a European Union scholarship to complete a Master of Science degree at the University of Leicester.

Career

After three years in an information technology career, Burak started her media career as a broadcast assistant for BBC weather, and trained as a broadcast meteorologist during this time. She began broadcasting as a relief forecaster for BBC regions and nations, eventually joining BBC East Midlands as one of their permanent forecast team, before becoming the lunchtime news anchor.
Burak moved to Sky News in 2006. Her main role involved presenting Sky News overnight, with her typical shift starting at midnight ending at 0600. During this time she presented Sky News. Sky News on the Hour from 0100 to 03:00 and then Sky World News from 0300 to 0600, which caters for audiences within Europe, Asia and Africa. She left Sky News in 2012, but returned in 2013.
Burak featured on the cover of Issue 2 of UK Zambians' Lifestyle Magazine in the summer of 2008. She was also appointed patron of the charity All Star Kids at the start of December 2008. She is an ambassador for No More Malaria UK, as a result of her own personal experiences as a child. Since January 2011, she has been the director of hair products company Gidore.
In August 2012, Burak joined eNCA, based in South Africa. She said that she had to relocate to South Africa as her husband had been offered a new job there, but that she was very much looking forward to the opportunity to join the channel's Africa Edition team and to have the opportunity to conduct live interviews rather than dealing with predominantly prerecorded material. But of her former employers, Sky News, she said: "Sky is an experience I would recommend to anybody. When you are working at that level in the industry, you could not ask for anything else." Burak rejoined Sky News in 2013. She joined the team of Al Jazeera English in Doha.
In May 2016 she returned to BBC News, BBC regions and nations, joining BBC East Midlands and BBC World News. She began presenting on the BBC News Channel on 13 August 2016. In September Burak became the main presenter of Inside Out East Midlands and the relaunched England edition, which is a weekly round-up of the three best reports from across the country.