Miranda Sawyer

Miranda Sawyer (born 1967) is an English journalist and broadcaster. She grew up in Wilmslow, Cheshire with her brother Toby, who is an actor. She was educated at Cheadle Hulme School in Greater Manchester and has a degree in Jurisprudence from Pembroke College, Oxford. She moved to London in 1988 to begin a career as a journalist with the magazine Smash Hits.

In 1993, she became the youngest winner of the Periodical Publishers Association Magazine Writer of the Year award for her work on Select magazine. She formerly wrote columns for Time Out (1993–96) and the Daily Mirror (2000–03), and was a frequent contributor to Mixmag and The Face during the 1990s.

She is now a feature writer for The Observer and its radio critic. Her writing appears in GQ, Vogue and The Guardian and she is a regular arts critic in print, on television and on radio. She was a member of the judging panel for the 2007 Turner Prize and the panel that awarded Liverpool its Capital of Culture status.

In 2004, Sawyer wrote, researched and presented an hour-long documentary for Channel 4 about the age of consent, Writing in The Guardian in 2003 an article entitled 'sex is not just for grown-ups' she argued for the age of consent to be reduced to 12 and argued against a 'near in age clause'. Sex Before 16: How the Law Is Failing. ' In 2007, she presented a highly personal documentary for More4 on abortion rights in the US, A Matter of Life and Death, as part of its Travels with My Camera strand.

She has been an occasional guest on the UK arts programme Newsnight Review and The Culture Show on BBC Two, and also BBC Radio 2 and BBC Radio 6 Music's Radcliffe and Maconie Show. She also took part in a celebrity edition of BBC Two's afternoon quiz show The Weakest Link.

Her first book Park and Ride, a travel book on the Great British suburbs, was published by Little, Brown in 1999.

She is married to Belfast-born comedian and actor Michael Smiley. In 2014, she appeared in The Life of Rock with Brian Pern as herself.