Meera Syal

Feroza Syal

Meera Syal was born in Wolverhampton in 1961. She grew up in Essington, a mining village in Staffordshire where her parents, Surendra Syal and Surinder Kaur, had moved with her brother, Rajeev Syal, who would later become the home affairs editor for the Guardian newspaper. The family later moved to Walsall. Her parents had grown up in rural Punjab, and her grandfather, Tek Chand, had agitated against the British as a student while studying in Lahore. He later worked as a journalist for the Urdu newspaper MiIlap. During partition, in 1947, the family was forced to flee to Delhi. Her parents met while studying in Delhi in the 1950s and married in 1958. The family arrived in Britain in 1960, part of what Kavita Puri has termed the ‘Three Pound’ generation, the maximum amount of foreign currency people were allowed to exchange on departure from India. Her father worked as an accountant and her mother as a teacher.

Meera Syal went to Queen Mary’s High School and then went to Manchester University to study English and drama. After graduating, Syal had planned to study for a master's in drama and psychotherapy to be followed by a PGCE. During this time, however, she started to write plays, and the one-woman show One of Us (1983), co-devised with Jackie Shapiro, for which she won Most Promising Performer at the Edinburgh Festival, made her change course.

One of her earliest film roles was the Retake Film and Video Collective’s film Majdhar (1984) starring Rita Wolf. Throughout her career, Syal has written for radio, television, theatre and film, significantly changing the way in which British South Asian lives are represented on screen. She was a scriptwriter for Farrukh Dhondy’s Tandoori Nights on Channel 4 (1985). She has written three novels: Anita and Me (1996), which has been adapted for stage and screen, Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999), later adapted for television, and The House of Hidden Mothers (2015).

The radio comedy show Masala FM, which parodies the emergent British South Asian radio stations like Sunrise Radio, preceded the sketch comedy Goodness Gracious Me, which marked a watershed moment in British television comedy. Co-created with Sanjeev Bhaskar, Anil Gupta, Kulvinder Ghir, Nina Wadia and Nitin Sawhney, the show features the iconic comedy sketch ‘Going for an English’ and parodies British South Asian youth culture through iconic characters such as the Bhangramuffins and the Minx twins. The show ran on BBC Radio 4 between 1996 and 1998 and then transferred to BBC Two for three series between 1998 and 2001; several specials followed. She wrote the screenplay for Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach (1993), centring British South Asian women’s lives.

Her work at the National Theatre includes Peer Gynt, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Ayub Khan Din’s Rafta, Rafta… and A Tupperware of Ashes, written by Tanika Gupta, whom she met in the 1990s as part of the Asian Women Writers’ Collective. She has played Miss Hannigan in the musical Annie and appeared as Kitty in the musical Bombay Dreams, for which she also wrote the book. She has performed many roles in the West End and off-West End and regional theatres. She played Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing at the RSC and Shirley Valentine at the Menier Chocolate Factory, for which she won a Best Actress award. With Sanjeev Bhaskar she also co-wrote the television sketch talkshow The Kumars at No. 42.

In 2023 she was awarded a BAFTA Fellowship for her outstanding contribution to television. In 2024 she starred in Tanika Gupta’s play A Tupperware of Ashes at the National Theatre, for which she was nominated for an Olivier Award.