Meera Syal is an actress, author and journalist much-loved for her brilliantly funny performances in television programmes such as the iconic and multi award-winning Goodness Gracious Me (which she also co-wrote) and Emmy Award-winning The Kumars at No.42 in which she played naughty Granny, Ummi Kumar and was nominated for BAFTA for Best Comedy Performance. Meera’s parents emigrated from New Delhi in 1960 and she was born in Wolverhampton in the West Midlands and educated at Manchester University where she read English and Drama, gaining a rare Double First. She is an acclaimed and popular author, drawing on childhood experiences growing up in a small Black Country mining community, as literally “The Only Asians In The Village”, which provided the background to her first novel Anita and Me. Meera is also the author of Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, about the loves, lives and infidelities of three East London Asian women, and adapted this into a RIMA winning BBC series in which she played one of the lead roles.