Miranda Sawyer



Miranda Sawyer (born 3rd January 1967) is an English journalist and broadcaster.

Sawyer grew up in Wilmslow, Cheshire with her brother Toby, who is an actor. She has a degree in Jurisprudence from 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 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 Mirror (2000-3), 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, 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 in 1999.

She is 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. In 2014, she appeared in The Life of Rock with Brian Pern as herself.