Roula Khalaf, journalist
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 22 March 2026
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Roula Khalaf is a journalist and the first woman to serve as editor of the Financial Times in its 138‑year history. She joined the paper in 1995 as North Africa correspondent, covering the Algerian civil war before reporting more broadly across the Middle East, including Syria, Iran and Iraq, and later the Arab Spring.
Roula was born in Beirut and grew up there during the Lebanese civil war which began in 1975. She studied communications at Syracuse University in New York State and then completed a Master’s degree in International Affairs at Columbia University.
She joined Forbes Magazine in 1989 before relocating to the UK. Her work has earned several awards, including Foreign Commentator of the Year at the Editorial Intelligence Comment in 2016 Awards and the Foreign Press Association’s Feature Story of the Year for her reporting on Qatar in 2013.
Roula has two children with her husband Assaad and lives in London.
DISC ONE: Misunderstanding - Genesis DISC TWO: Dernière Danse - Indila DISC THREE: Oghneyat Al Bostah - Ziad Rahbani DISC FOUR: Feeling Good - Nina Simone DISC FIVE: Zina - Babylone DISC SIX: Ya Laure Houbbouki - Fairuz DISC SEVEN: Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) - Green Day DISC EIGHT: 7 Seconds - Youssou N’Dour ft Neneh Cherry
BOOK CHOICE: A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin LUXURY ITEM: A notebook and pen CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Ya Laure Houbbouki - Fairuz
Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Paula McGinley
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | An early start here. It's time to kick off. |
| 0:10.0 | Your day. Morning! |
| 0:11.9 | What a line-up. |
| 0:13.3 | Oh, thanks very much. We do get some great guests on the show. |
| 0:16.1 | The crowd is loving this. |
| 0:18.3 | Thanks, guys. Thank you. Too kind. |
| 0:20.2 | From morning chaos to match day commentary. |
| 0:23.6 | And everything in between. BBC sounds packed with personality. |
| 0:28.9 | Hello, I'm Lauren Levern and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:33.7 | Every week I ask my guests to choose the 8 tracks, book and luxury that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. |
| 0:41.1 | For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, |
| 0:44.4 | but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:48.5 | Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else. |
| 0:52.9 | I hope you enjoy listening. My castaway this week is the journalist Rula Kalaf. |
| 1:18.8 | She's the editor of the Financial Times, |
| 1:21.1 | August Bible of city traders, business leaders and policy makers. |
| 1:25.5 | These are challenging times for traditional newspapers, advertising revenues falling |
| 1:29.9 | and digital technology and social media have transformed how people consume news and information, |
| 1:36.0 | and increasingly fractured media landscape is also having an impact on the type of stories that |
| 1:41.0 | cut through. But she's no stranger to challenge. She was born in Beirut and grew up |
| 1:46.3 | during the height of the Lebanese Civil War, fascinated by the foreign correspondents who stayed at the |
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