UK
Nigella Lawson confirmed as new judge on The Great British Bake Off
The Jewish cook and food writer will replace Prue Leith on the Channel 4 show
January 26, 2026 15:38
The Jewish cook and food writer will replace Prue Leith on the Channel 4 show
January 26, 2026 15:38Jewish cook and food writer Nigella Lawson has been confirmed as a new judge on The Great British Bake Off (GBBO), taking over from Prue Leith, who is leaving the show after nine seasons.
Nigella first rose to fame in 1998 after the publication of her debut cookbook How to Eat.
A year later, she hit British TV screens in her first cooking show Nigella Bites on Channel 4. Since then, she has hosted at least nine other cooking shows, including Nigella Express, Nigella’s Christmas Kitchen and most recently the BBC’s, Nigella’s Cook, Eat, Repeat in 2020, and published 11 more bestselling cookbooks.
Commenting on her new role on the GBBO, the 66-year-old said: “I’m uncharacteristically rather lost for words right now! Of course it’s daunting to be following in the footsteps of Prue Leith and Mary Berry before her, great dames both, but I’m also bubbling with excitement.”
She added: "The Great British Bake Off is more than a television programme, it’s a national treasure – and it’s a huge honour to be entrusted with it.”
Although her recipes are often treif-heavy, Nigella often references the impact her Jewish heritage has had on her cooking and relationship with food.
Talking about the Christmas traditions she inherited from her mother in an interview with The Guardian in 2000, she said: “It's a very Jewish thing to want to provide a huge spread. I always cook for eight, but make enough to feed 30.”
In a 2018 interview with The Australian Jewish News, she spoke about the connection between food and emotion in the Jewish psyche, saying: “I think that if you are Jewish, you feel that food as sustenance is important; food as a way of forging bonds with people and a sense of family is important; but we also cannot help but to think of food symbolically. We don't have to be taught that. It's not about any religious thing – it's in how we are”.
Nigella is the daughter of politician Nigel Lawson and Vanessa Salmon, heiress to the J. Lyons and Co. fortune.
In 2010 – the year that GBBO first premiered on UK TV screens – Nigella opened the now shut Jewish Museum in Camden, alongside presenter and broadcaster Vanessa Feltz, and television executive and presenter Alan Yentob, who died in May last year.
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