Miranda Sawyer

Miranda Sawyer (born 1967) is a self-proclaimed liberal feminist. As a fashionable London journalist and broadcaster, her guiding ethical framework has, up to now, been a vague combination of humanism, libertarianism and anti-establishmentarianism. Recently, however, this loose, unchallenged framework no longer felt sturdy enough.

She grew up in Wilmslow, Cheshire with her brother Toby, an actor best known for his part in the short-lived revival of Crossroads, and took a degree in Jurisprudence at Pembroke College, Oxford. She moved to London in 1988 to begin her career as a journalist on the magazine Smash Hits.

In 1993, she became the youngest winner of the PPA Magazine Writer of the Year award for her work on Select magazine. She wrote a column for Time Out from 1993 to 1996, and one for The Mirror from 2000 to 2003, 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 critic at arts shows across all media, as well as a member of the judging panel for the 2007 Turner Prize and the panel that awarded Liverpool its Capital of Culture status.

In 2004, Miranda Sawyer wrote, researched and presented an hour-long documentary for Channel 4 about the age of consent entitled, Sex Before 16: How the Law Is Failing. In 2006, she made a highly personal documentary for More 4 on abortion rights in the US, "A Matter of Life and Death", as part of its Travels With My Camera strand. She also took part in a celebrity edition of BBC 2'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 and Company in 1999 and has been reprinted several times. She is also an occasional guest on the UK arts programme Newsnight Review on BBC2, The Culture Show (BBC 2) and also BBC Radio 2's Radcliffe and Maconie Show.

She is married to Belfast born comedian Michael Smiley.