The broadcaster has spoken about how much that experience on Celebrity Race Across the World meant to her and her father, Bal, and now her wider journey using travel to explore people, places and cultures is being recognised with a special award.
Rani will receive the Special Contribution Award at the Travel Media Awards 2026 at The Savoy in London on 26 October.
But behind the accolade is a career in which travel has taken the Bradford-born broadcaster from the Arctic and Costa Rica to Kyrgyzstan, and allowed her to tell stories ranging from family and identity to displacement and statelessness.
“Travel broadens your horizons, opens your mind and humbles you,” Rani said.
“Seeing the world from different perspectives, breathtaking landscapes, bustling cities, tasting new flavours, meeting people from other cultures and hearing stories, you see that there’s so much to learn and enjoy and how humanity is the same wherever you go.”
One of Rani’s most personal journeys came in 2025 when she appeared alongside her father Bal in Celebrity Race Across the World.
The pair travelled through the Caribbean and Colombia, without the comforts normally associated with celebrity travel programmes.
For Rani, however, the importance of the journey was not simply where they went.
She has since spoken about what it meant to have five uninterrupted weeks travelling with her father, something that had rarely been possible when she was growing up.
Born and raised in Bradford, Rani is the daughter of Indian parents and has previously spoken about her upbringing and the experiences that shaped her identity.
Her parents’ strong work ethic meant conventional family holidays were not a regular feature of childhood, making the opportunity to travel with her father decades later particularly meaningful.
That journey represented another chapter in a career where travelling has frequently been about the people she meets rather than simply the destinations she visits.
Millions of viewers know Rani from more than a decade presenting BBC One’s Countryfile, while she also presents BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour every Thursday and Friday.
Her broadcasting work has taken her much further afield.
As an ambassador for Discover the World, she has reported from Iceland, the Arctic and Costa Rica.
Her humanitarian work has also given travel a very different purpose.
As a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, Rani travelled to Kyrgyzstan, where she met stateless families and heard first-hand about lives shaped by displacement and questions of belonging.
She also narrated Forced to Flee, a podcast which allowed displaced people to tell their experiences in their own words. The series went on to win a Webby Award.
It reflects a recurring theme in Rani’s work: using the places she visits as a way of understanding the people who live there.
“Technology may transform how we experience the world, but meeting people from other cultures and hearing their stories remains one of travel’s greatest privileges,” has been a theme throughout her work.
For Rani herself, there is a simpler conclusion.
“I’m incredibly privileged to have travelled as much as I have and I have no intention to stop,” she said.
“Where are we off to next?”
Rani’s storytelling now stretches across television, radio, books and digital media.
She is Chancellor of the University of Bradford and the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Right Sort of Girl.
In 2025, she launched her own YouTube channel, ItsAnitaRani, before creating Sisters of Defiance in 2026.
The video and audio podcast focuses on women and the personal stories behind their achievements.
Its first series featured guests including Dame Meera Syal, Emma Grede, Gisèle Pelicot, Beverley Knight and Anoushka Shankar.
The programme reached number one in two Apple podcast categories and was named among The Guardian’s Best Podcasts of 2026 So Far. A second series is due later this year.
Anthony Leyens, chairman of APL Media, said Rani had been chosen unanimously for the Special Contribution Award.
He said: “Through her broadcasting, writing and humanitarian work, Anita has brought people, places and cultures to life with warmth, intelligence and curiosity.”
The award recognises contributions to travel storytelling across television, radio and print.
For Rani, though, perhaps the most telling example of what travel can offer did not require an exotic destination or an award.
It was simply having the time to travel alongside her dad.
From a Bradford childhood where her parents were often too busy working for family holidays, to five weeks crossing countries together decades later, travel gave father and daughter something increasingly difficult to find in everyday life – uninterrupted time with one another.
And after a career spent discovering the stories of people around the world, Rani appears in no hurry to put away her passport.
