Nihal Arthanayake

Why organisations work with Nihal Arthanayake

• A daily-broadcast interviewer’s instinct for live conversation. Over eight years presenting the BBC Radio 5 Live afternoon show, plus the Headliners interview series, mean panel craft built across thousands of hours of unscripted live radio.
• A named winner at the 2019 BBC Radio & Music Awards for Interview of the Year. The room can feel the difference when an interviewer can actually draw out a senior guest, not just read questions in order.
• The author of a serious trade book on conversation. Let’s Talk (Hachette, 2022) is built on interviews with figures from Mary McAleese to hostage negotiators, which gives Nihal a content keynote that other hosts simply cannot offer.
• Twenty-five years of cultural fluency across BBC, MTV, Channel 4 and BBC Two. Comfortable on a Hugo Boss or Mercedes stage and equally credible chairing a panel on race, identity or media. Few hosts cover both rooms.
• Public-trust credentials that travel well into sponsor-sensitive briefs. Appointed to the BBC’s Independent Diversity Advisory Board alongside Sir Lenny Henry and Dame Floella Benjamin; trustee at HOME Manchester; ambassador for the British Asian Trust.

Biography highlights

• BBC Radio 5 Live presenter; eight-plus years on the afternoon show; current host of the Headliners interview series.
• Winner of Interview of the Year, 2019 BBC Radio & Music Awards.
• Author of Let’s Talk: How to Have Better Conversations (Hachette, 2022).
• BBC Radio 1 alumnus; co-host of Asian Beats (Sony Radio Award winner) and host of Review with Nihal.
• Appointed to the BBC’s Independent Diversity Advisory Board in 2014 by the BBC Director General.
• Trustee, HOME Manchester. Former trustee, Southbank Centre and British Council. Ambassador, British Asian Trust.

Biography

Live conversation is harder than it looks on a run sheet. A guarded executive answers in talking points. A four-person panel splinters. An awards stage drifts by the third category. The job of the host is to recover all of that without the audience noticing.

That is the craft Nihal Arthanayake has spent twenty-five years building. Eight years presenting the afternoon show on BBC Radio 5 Live, plus the Sunday interview series Headliners, mean a live-radio interviewer who reads a room in real time. The 2019 BBC Radio & Music Award for Interview of the Year recognised the same skill in a different setting: a candid, on-the-record conversation that other interviewers could not have got.

That craft is the subject of his 2022 Hachette book, Let’s Talk: How to Have Better Conversations. The book draws on conversations with former Irish president Mary McAleese, Professor Tanya Byron, Lorraine Kelly and Johann Hari, plus hostage negotiators and clinicians, to ask what actually changes when two people listen to each other properly. It gives organisations a content keynote on dialogue, listening and disagreement that most hosts cannot offer.

The broader public-trust footprint is what makes the work travel into sponsor-sensitive briefs. Appointed to the BBC’s Independent Diversity Advisory Board in 2014 by the Director General, alongside Sir Lenny Henry, George the Poet and Dame Floella Benjamin. Trustee at HOME Manchester. Ambassador for the British Asian Trust. Corporate hosting clients include Adobe, Google, X, GQ, Hugo Boss, Mercedes-Benz, Tottenham Hotspur and Boots.

Key speaking topics

• Conference and awards hosting
• Panel moderation and on-stage interviewing
• The craft of conversation and dialogue
• Communication and listening as leadership skills
• Diversity, representation and identity in media
• Cultural commentary and the public conversation

Ideal for

• Senior corporate awards, summits and gala dinners that need a host who can carry a long-form running order
• Town halls, leadership conferences and offsites where a CEO or chair will be interviewed live on stage
• Panel sessions on culture, identity or representation that need an experienced moderator on contested ground
• Internal communication, L&D and people-team events on listening, dialogue and conversation skills

Audience outcomes

• A live event that holds energy from welcome to close, with senior guests drawn out rather than read at
• A clearer practical sense of what makes a conversation actually work, drawn from Let’s Talk and twenty-five years of interviewing
• A panel that moves, with a moderator who reads the room and lets the strongest contributions land
• A host who is credible on both commercial and culture-and-identity briefs, without switching register awkwardly between them