Kate Humble was born in 1968 and grew up in rural Berkshire in a house next to a farm. She had what she describes as a ‘proper childhood’ – building camps, racing snails, climbing trees, interspersed with trips to A&E to patch up things when they broke. At the neighbouring farm she learnt to ride horses and developed a lifelong passion for mucking out. At 18 she left school and home, and worked odd jobs for a year to fund a year travelling in Africa, which, she says, taught her far more than she would ever have learnt at university. On her return to the UK she got her first job in television as a runner and met Producer/Director Ludo Graham who she married in 1992. She travelled whenever she had the opportunity and in 1996 had her first travel article published by ‘The Telegraph’. That same year she got her first job at the BBC as a researcher on ‘Animal Hospital’ and then ‘The Holiday Programme’. It was on her second day in the Holiday office when she was asked by the programme’s editor if she had ever presented before. ‘No,’ she said ‘and nor do I want to.’
Kate has been presenting programmes and writing articles and books for the last twenty years. Her latest credits include Yellowstone: Wildest Winter to Blazing Summer, Back to the Land, Curious Creatures and Extreme Wives with Kate Humble all for BBC Two, Animal Park for BBC One Daytime, The Royal Welsh Show 2018 for BBC One Wales and BBC Four and Wild Things for Sky One. Her latest book Where the Hearth is came out in 2023.
In 2007 she and Ludo moved to a smallholding in Wales and in 2011 set up ‘Humble by Nature’ a rural skills school on a working farm in the Wye Valley. They live with a variety of feathered and furry livestock and three dogs.
Photo: Sarah Hudson Vernon.