[2] Afua Hirsch was born in Stavanger, Norway,[3] to a British father and a Ghanaian mother, and was raised in Wimbledon, southwest London.

Her maternal grandfather, who graduated from the University of Cambridge, was involved in establishing the post-independence education system in Ghana but later became a political exile.

[7] Hirsch was educated at the private Wimbledon High School,[8] and then studied philosophy, politics, and economics at St Peter's College, Oxford (1999–2002).

"[18][4] The following May, Hirsch said the idea of removing Nelson's Column distracted from her main point that Britain should look more carefully at its past to understand itself better today.

[19] In an article introducing her television documentary, The Battle for Britain's Heroes, Hirsch stated that she "wasn't actually waiting in a bulldozer, ready to storm Trafalgar Square, as some people seemed to believe".

Reviewing Hirsch's 2023 book, Decolonising My Body: A Radical Exploration of Rituals and Beauty, Niellah Arboine wrote in The Guardian: "If her first book Brit(ish) was about grappling with her identity as a black British woman of mixed heritage, Decolonising My Body aims to unpack how her identity and wider society have shaped her physically.

In the television programme The Battle for Britain's Heroes, first broadcast by Britain's Channel 4 in late May 2018, Hirsch raised lesser-known aspects of the career of former British prime minister Winston Churchill, such as his attitude to Indians and advocacy of tear gassing "uncivilised tribes" in Mesopotamia (now partly modern-day Iraq) after the First World War.

[32] Hirsch holds the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Journalism and Communication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

[33] Hirsch was on the panel of judges for the 2019 Booker Prize for Fiction that, causing much controversy, made Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo joint winners.