Gavin Esler

A presenter on the BBC TV Newsnight programme, as well as on BBC World, Gavin is also an author of three novels and an account of the United States during the Clinton years, ‘The United States of Anger’. He has strong family connections with Belfast and has lived in and around the city on and off since he was a teenager. His first job as a journalist was on the Belfast Telegraph, and then with the BBC in Northern Ireland during many of the worst years of the Troubles.

‘My Belfast is the world’s biggest village. It’s not that everybody knows each other in this city – it’s just that it often feels that way. It’s the walk along Royal Avenue or Ann Street where you cannot help but bump into someone you know. It’s the fact that you have to forget whatever it was you were supposed to be doing because a conversation becomes absolutely necessary -a few wise cracks about anything from football and the weather to politics. My Belfast begins with the view from the hill on the M2 motorway near Glengormley, where the city and Belfast Lough are on full display. It’s the shipyard cranes and City Hall, the Linenhall Library, and the places I used to work – the Belfast Telegraph building and the BBC. It’s also the places for after work – McGlade’s bar near the Tele building, and the smell of a pint of stout with oysters in the Crown Liquor Saloon on Great Victoria Street. My Belfast is the faces and the stories and the songs and, above all, it’s the people who make it smile.