Carolyn Hitt
Carolyn Hitt is a Welsh journalist, broadcaster and freelance writer.
Born in Llwynypia, Rhondda, Carolyn Hitt read English at Oxford University.
Journalism and broadcasting
After training on the Neath Guardian and Merthyr Express, Carolyn joined The Western Mail in 1992 and progressed to Features Editor, winning Welsh Feature Writer of the Year in 1998. That same year she switched to broadcasting, joining the independent television and radio company Presentable Ltd. In 2012 she co-founded the all-woman production company Parasol Media Ltd.
She has written and presented television and radio series on the arts, popular culture, consumer issues, women’s issues, history and sport for Radio 4, BBC Wales and ITV Wales. As a producer, she has worked with some of Wales’s biggest names, heading up TV projects as diverse as Land of Our Mothers – a women’s history of Wales presented by Baroness Tanni Grey Thompson – and Max Boyce’s Big Birthday, which notched up record viewing figures.
Awards
Her broadcasting commitments are combined with a freelance writing career. She has written for The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and has been a Western Mail columnist for 25 years. Though she writes regularly on a wide variety of subjects, a particular passion for rugby has proved an award-winning sideline. She was the first woman to win Welsh Sports Journalist of the Year and went on to win the award for the whole of the UK – twice. She also became the first woman to win The Welsh Sports Hall of Fame Journalist of the Year.
A former Welsh Woman of the Year finalist, she has been twice Highly Commended for Columnist of the Year in the UK Regional Press Awards in the past three years.
Books
Carolyn has contributed to several literary and sporting anthologies and in 2012 she published her first book, Wales Play In Red – on Welsh rugby in the noughties. (The title is taken from her experience of being the only woman in the rugby international press box and being teasingly told “Remember…Wales play in red!”) Her second book – Wales In the 1970s, a retro-style annual – was published in 2015. Her next book will be on Welsh women in politics.
Other commitments
She is an Ambassador for Velindre Cancer Centre and is on the board of:
- the National Dictionary of Welsh Biography
- the Welsh Rugby Charitable Trust
- the Welsh Sports Hall of Fame
- Ty Hapus, a charity supporting people with early-onset Alzheimer’s.
Her proudest claim to fame, however, is beating a 15-year-old Gary Barlow into second place in the BBC carol-writing competition A Song For Christmas in 1986! Not that it held Gary back…