Sheila Dillon

Sheila Dillon is a British food journalist who began her career writing for the New York food magazine Food Monitor. She is known to listeners of Radio Four as presenter of The Food Programme, on which she has appeared for more than 20 years. Dillon has been the programme's regular presenter since 2001.

Dillon was born in Hoghton, Lancashire, and grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. She is from a farming background and went to a Roman Catholic Primary School. Her grandfather was a head joiner on the Hoghton Tower Estate. Her mother worked as a weaver and her father was a barber who came from a farming family in County Tyrone, Ireland. She has one younger sister and a younger brother.

Dillon studied English at Leicester University where she wrote for the University newspaper. At university she became involved in the Women's Movement.

After university, Dillon spent a year in Finland and then found postgraduate work in the American Midwest in publishing at the Indiana University Press. During her time at Little Brown & Co Publishers, she was involved in a landmark sex discrimination case pertaining to issues of equal pay which helped change discriminatory employment practises in the USA.

Working with Derek Cooper, Dillon was responsible for coverage of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), GM and food irradiation which helped establish food as an important, newsworthy subject. She has been the presenter of Radio 4’s The Food Programme since taking over from Derek Cooper. It is the UK’s longest running broadcast on food and farming. She hosts the annual BBC Radio Food and Farming Awards.

Dillon has won awards for her work, including the Glaxo Science Prize, the Caroline Walker Award and several Glenfiddich Awards. In 2008, she was awarded an honorary degree by City University for her work, which, the citation says, "has changed the way in which we think about food." She is also a patron of Oxford Gastronomic.

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