Actress and author Meera Syal will be a guest of the Queen
March 11, 2004

Actress and author Meera Syal will be a guest of the Queen as she hosts a special reception today to celebrate the achievements of women in society. It is the first exclusively female event to be held at Buckingham Palace. Other guests include the Prime Minister's wife, Cherie and the model Twiggy.


Actress, writer and novelist Meera Syal

Actress, writer and novelist. Meera Syal was born and brought up in Essington, a Staffordshire mining village five miles north-east of the centre of Wolverhampton.She was educated at Manchester University where she read English and Drama. She co-wrote the script for 'My Sister Wife', a three-part BBC Television series, and wrote the film Bhaji on the Beach for Channel 4. She co-writes and is a cast member of the popular BBC Television comedy series 'Goodness Gracious Me'. She also works as a journalist and is a regular contributor to The Guardian.

Meera Syal's childhood experiences growing up in a small mining community provided the background to her first novel, Anita and Me (1996). The novel was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and won a Betty Trask Award. It tells the story of Meena Kumar, a young Asian girl struggling to accommodate the opposing influences of her white schoolfriends and her traditional Punjabi background. Syal's second novel, Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999), narrates the adventures of three young Asian women growing up in Britain.

She learns, however, to come to terms with her own British Asian identity. The village, Tollington, could so easily be Essington:-

"From the crest of the hill, on a clear day, you could see the industrial chimneys of Wolverhampton, smoking like fat men's cigars, and sometimes a glimpse of the dark fringes of Cannock Chase, several square miles of thick conifers bristling with secrets and deer."

Meera Syal was awarded an MBE in 1997 and won the 'Media Personality of the Year' award at the Commission for Racial Equality's annual 'Race in the Media' awards (2000), as well as the EMMA (BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Award) for Media Personality of the Year in 2001.

 

Works
Selected works by the author
Anita and me (1996)
Bhaji on the Beach (1994) [Film]
Life isn't all ha ha hee hee (2000) [Novel]
One of Us [Play]