Lis Howell
British writer and television executive
Lis Howell is director of broadcasting at City, University of London, running the broadcasting and television journalism programmes, and also deputy head of the journalism department. She is a journalist who went on to become a senior executive in British television and also writes murder-mystery novels.
Early life and education
Howell was born in Liverpool in 1951 and was educated at the Liverpool Institute for Girls and the University of Bristol, where she read English Literature. She got a diploma in teacher training from Leeds Trinity & All Saints and soon after was offered a reporting job by Radio Leeds.
Career
In 1977 she became the first woman reporter at Border Television and, two years later, went to Granada Television, then Tyne Tees Television from 1981 to 1984. She then decided to quit journalism, opting to become the village postmistress at Mawbray, in northern Cumbria, opening a small restaurant in the adjoining barn and having a baby, Alex, in 1984.
The following year she worked her way back into television, by suggesting to Border TV a programme on a mother and her baby living in a remote country area, which led to a series, Border Babies. She did another series of six shows and was then offered the job of Border's Head of News, the first woman to be appointed to the job. She was later deputy programme controller and in 1989 was joint winner with ITN of a Royal Television Society award for coverage of the Lockerbie air disaster, where she broke the story and organised the incoming footage from the scene.
She became Managing Editor of Sky News later that year and was sent to Saudi Arabia to organise the company's coverage of the first Gulf War.
“Lis Howell” enters the record as british writer and television executive. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Howell, British and writer can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Lis Howell” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Howell, British and writer provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6557731. VIAF identifies the subject as 9753711. The Library of Congress control number is nr97035275. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1951, 1977, 1981 and 1984.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lis Howell” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.