Josie Barnard

"It was minus 20, and there was just a bit of wire attaching the tin tray we were sitting on to the skidoo that was speeding us onto the snow-clad Hardanger Plateau...""

A trip on a tin tray into the biggest wilderness area in Europe and the news that she could pronounce 'fjellstue' perfectly, both during her trip to Norway to produce the BBC Radio 4 feature Heroes of Telemark, proved personal highlights for Josie Barnard.

Having kicked off her radio career with a piece on the themes of birth and re-birth in the movie Ghostbusters for BBC Radio Merseyside at the age of 19, Barnard has taken microphones to places that few broadcasters, with grey-green eyes, a Yorkshire upbringing and a hyper-mobile left thumb, have dared go; down pot-holes, up in hot air balloons - she even got Jon Snow to wax lyrical about his neckties.

She presented weekly programmes on London's GLR, and had a spectacularly successful spell presenting the weekend show on indy station, Viva FM. BBC Radio 4 programmes such as Going Places, Home Truths and Questions Questions have all regularly featured her work as a presenter, columnist, reporter and researcher, as have one-off programmes including Radio 4's Wriggling with Eels.

In addition to Heroes of Telemark, she has produced one-off programmes including Guide Friday for BBC Asia, and Meter Mad for Radio 4, which not only made Pick of the Week but surprised swathes of listeners into feeling affection for parking meters.

And as if ranging from Oslo to Asia for Whistledown in her quest for the perfect radio interview wasn't enough, Josie Barnard is an acclaimed writer. Her first book, the Betty Trask award-winning Poker Face (Virago) was published in 1997 and was followed by The Pleasure Dome, described by Gavin Turk in Tatler magazine as 'sexy'. With Radio 4 programmes on job centres and the M1 in the pipeline, and a non-fiction book due out with Virago publishers in 2010, without a doubt, as the Observer put it, 'Barnard is one to watch'.