Meera Syal

Syal was born in Wolverhampton, West Midlands, and grew up in Essington, a mining village a few miles to the north. Her Punjab-born parents, Surendra Syal (father) and Surrinder Uppal (mother), came to the UK from New Delhi. Her father was Khatri, and her mother was Jatt. When she was young, the family moved to Bloxwich. This landscape – and the family's status as the only Asian family in a small Midlands mining village – was later to form the backdrop to her novel (later filmed) Anita and Me, which Syal described in a 2003 BBC interview as semi-autobiographical. She attended Queen Mary's High School in nearby Walsall and then studied English and Drama at Manchester University, graduating with a Double First.

Syal wrote the screenplay for the 1993 film Bhaji on the Beach, directed by Gurinder Chadha, of Bend It Like Beckham fame. She was on the team that wrote and performed in the BBC comedy sketch show Goodness Gracious Me (1996–2001), originally on radio and then on television. She was a scriptwriter on A.R. Rahman and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bombay Dreams and she played the grandmother Sushila in the International Emmy-award winning series The Kumars at No. 42, which ran for seven series.

In October 2008, she starred in the BBC Two sitcom Beautiful People. This role, as Aunty Hayley, continued in 2009. Syal starred in the eleventh series of Holby City as consultant Tara Sodi. In 2009, she guest starred in Minder and starred in the film Mad, Sad & Bad. In 2010, she played Shirley Valentine in a one-woman show at the Menier Chocolate Factory, later transferring to Trafalgar Studios. In the same year she played Nasreen Chroudhry in two episodes of Doctor Who alongside Matt Smith.

Syal is an occasional singer, having achieved a number one record with Gareth Gates and her co-stars from The Kumars at No. 42 with Spirit in the Sky, the Comic Relief single. She earlier (1988) provided vocals for a bhangra version of "Then He Kissed Me" – composed by Biddu and with the Pakistani pop star Nazia Hassan – as part of the short-lived girl band Saffron. In June 2003 she appeared as a guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs programme with a selection of music by Nitin Sawhney, Madan Bala Sindhu, Joni Mitchell, Pizzicato Five, Sukhwinder Singh, Louis Armstrong and others. The luxury she chose to ease her life as a castaway was a piano.

Having studied English at university and penned two novels and a variety of scripts and screenplays, Syal was chosen as one of the guests on "The Cultural Exchange" slot of Front Row on 30 April 2013, when she nominated To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee as a piece of art work which she loved.

From 1986–87 Syal presented Sunday East, a BBC programme.

As a journalist, she writes occasionally for The Guardian.

Syal won the National Student Drama Award for performing in One of Us which was written by Jacqueline Shapiro while at university. She won the Betty Trask Award for her first book Anita and Me and the Media Personality of the Year award at the Commission for Racial Equality's annual Race in the Media awards in 2000. She was given the Nazia Hassan Foundation award in 2003.

In 2011–12, Syal was appointed visiting professor of contemporary theatre at St Catherine's College, Oxford. She has an honorary degree from SOAS, University of London and from University of Roehampton.

She received her CBE from the Prince of Wales on 6 May 2015 at Buckingham Palace.

In 2017, Syal was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

In 2004, she took part in one episode of the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are?, which investigated her family history. Syal discovered that both her grandfathers had campaigned against British rule and presence in India: one as a communist journalist, the other as a Punjab protester who was imprisoned and tortured in the Golden Temple.

In January 2005, Syal married her frequent collaborator, Sanjeev Bhaskar, who plays her grandson in The Kumars at No. 42; the marriage ceremony took place in Lichfield, Staffordshire. Their son, named Shaan, was born at the Portland Hospital on 2 December 2005. Syal has a daughter, Chameli, from her previous marriage to journalist Shekhar Bhatia. Her brother is investigative journalist Rajeev Syal.

In February 2009, Syal was one of a number of British entertainers who signed an open letter printed in The Times protesting against the persecution of Bahá'ís in Iran.

In January 2011, Syal took part in the BBC Radio 4 programme My Teenage Diary, discussing growing up as the only British Asian girl in a small English town, feeling overweight and unattractive.

Screenplays

• Bhaji on the Beach (1993)
• Anita and Me (2002)

Stage

• One of Us (1983)
• The Oppressed Minorities Big Fun Show (1992)
• Goodness Gracious Me (1999)
• Bombay Dreams (2002)

Radio

• Goodness Gracious Me (1996–98)
• Masala FM (1996)

Television

• Tandoori Nights (1985)
• The Real McCoy (1991)
• My Sister Wife (1994)
• Goodness Gracious Me (1998)
• Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee (2005)
• Uncle Santa (UK Little Crackers TV series) (2010)

Novels

• Anita and Me (1996)
• Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999), published in German under the title Sari, Jeans und Chilischoten in 2003
• The House of Hidden Mothers (2015)

Stage

• The One of Us (1983)
• Serious Money (1987)
• Peer Gynt (1990)
• The Oppressed Minorities Big Fun Show (1992)
• The Vagina Monologues (2001)
• Bombay Dreams (2004)
• Rafta, Rafta... (2007)
• Shirley Valentine (2010)
• The Killing of Sister George (2011)
• Much Ado About Nothing (2012) as Beatrice
• Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2014) as Zehrunisa
• Romeo and Juliet (2016) as Nurse

Radio

• True Believers (1990)
• The World As We Know It (1999)
• Double Income, No Kids Yet (2001)
• A Small Town Murder (2010-)
• Bindi Business (2017)

Film and TV

• Majdhar (1983)
• The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 (1985)
• A Little Princess (1986)
• Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987)
• The Real McCoy (1991)
• Gummed Labels (1992)
• Taggart (1992)
• Sean's Show (1993)
• The Brain Drain (1993)
• Absolutely Fabulous (1994)
• New Best Friend (1994)
• Flight (1995)
• Degrees of Error (1995)
• Band of Gold (1995)
• It's Not Unusual (1995)
• Drop The Dead Donkey (1996)
• A Nice Arrangement (1996)
• Beautiful Thing (1996)
• Marsala FM (1996)
• Crossing The Floor (1996)
• Ruby (1997)
• Sixth Happiness (1997)
• The Book Quiz (1998)
• No Crying He Makes (1998)
• Keeping Mum (1998)
• Legal Affairs (1998)
• The World As We Know It (1999)
• The Strangerers (2000)
• Forgive and Forget (2000)
• Anita and Me (2002)
• Bad Girls (2004) Season 6 Episode 4
• Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee (2005)
• Murder Investigation Team (2005)
• The Amazing Mrs Pritchard (2006)
• Jekyll (2007)
• Kingdom (2007)
• Jhoom Barabar Jhoom (2007)
• When Were We Funniest? (2008)
• Beautiful People (2008–09)
• Holby City (2009)
• Desert Flower (2009)
• Minder (2009)
• Horrible Histories(2009)
• Doctor Who: "The Hungry Earth" (2010) and "Cold Blood" (2010)
• Tinga Tinga Tales (2010) Voice of Owl
• The Jury (2011)
• Hunted 2 Episodes (2012)
• Bollywood Carmen Live (2013)
• Absolutely Anything (2015)
• The Brink (2015)
• Broadchurch (2015)
• Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016)
• Doctor Strange (2016)

Her book Anita and Me has found its way onto school and university English syllabuses both in Britain and abroad. Scholarly literature on it includes:

• Rocío G. Davis, "India in Britain: Myths of Childhood in Meera Syal's Anita and Me", in Fernando Galván & Mercedes Bengoechea (ed.), On Writing (and) Race in Contemporary Britain, Universidad de Alcalá 1999, 139–46.
• Ana Maria Sanchez-Arce "Invisible Cities: Being and Creativity in Meera Syal’s Anita and Me and Ben Okri’s Astonishing the Gods", in Philip Laplace and Éric Tabuteau (eds), Cities on the Margin/ On the Margin of Cities: Representations of Urban Space in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction, Besançon: Presses Universitaires Franc-Comtoises, 2003: 113–30.
• Graeme Dunphy, "Meena's Mockingbird: From Harper Lee to Meera Syal", in Neophilologus 88, 2004, 637–59.