Meera Syal

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 Chaudhry in two episodes of Doctor Who alongside Matt Smith.

In 2004, Syal 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.

This landscape, and the family's status as the only Asian family in a small Midlands mining village of Essington, 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 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.

She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 1997 New Year Honours and in 2003 was listed in The Observer as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to drama and literature.

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.

Syal married journalist Shekhar Bhatia in 1989; they had a daughter together before divorcing in 2002. 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 registry office, Staffordshire. They have a son, born 2005.

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.

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

Meera Syal CBE (born Feroza Syal; 27 June 1961) is an English comedian, writer, playwright, singer, journalist, producer and actress. She rose to prominence as one of the team that created Goodness Gracious Me and portraying Sanjeev's grandmother, Ummi, in The Kumars at No. 42. She became one of the UK's best-known Asian personalities.