Background

Ethnicity: Syal's parents, Khatri father and Jat mother, immigrated to the United Kingdom from New Delhi.

Meera Syal was born on June 27, 1961, in Wolverhampton, United Kingdom. She is a daughter of Surinder Syal and Surinder Uppal.

Education

Meera Syal was raised in the only Asian family in a small Bloxwich. The fact had an impact on the plot of her subsequent novels afterward.

After studying at Queen Mary's High School not far away from Walsall, Syal entered Manchester University. She graduated with a Double First degree in English and Drama.

Later, SOAS University of London and the University of Roehampton provided her with honorary degrees.

Career

Meera Syal started her career in the 1980s. In 1983, along with Jackie Shapiro, she co-wrote the one-woman play 'One of Us' which was first presented at the Stephen Joseph Studio. Syal played all the fifteen parts. Performed at the Edinburgh International Festival, it provided Syal with a three-year contract from the Royal Court Theatre director.

As to the writing, Meera Syal first gained recognition with her screenplay for the 1994 movie 'Bhaji on the Beach', a tale of the Asian immigrant experience in England. She returned to this theme with her first novel, the acclaimed 'Anita and Me'. Published in 1996 in England and the following year in the United States, the novel is told through the eyes of the title’s 'me', the adolescent Meena, the Punjabi-born girl whose overprotective parents are members of an English town’s small Indian community in the early 1970s. Syal has used her cultural heritage again for her next novels, 'Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee' and 'The House of Hidden Mothers', her most recent writing work.

Beginning in 1996, Syal joined the team of the BBC comedy sketch show 'Goodness Gracious Me' to which she contributed both as an author and actress. The other major projects of the time in that capacities include Andrew Lloyd Webber's 'Bombay Dreams' and 'The Kumars at No. 42'. In the following years, Syal pursued her acting career.

In addition to the regular appearances in movies and comic shows, she has tried her hand as a singer and a radio host as well. So, from 1986 to 1987, she hosted a BBC programme Sunday East. Later, she performed the 'Spirit in the Sky' song from The Kumars at No. 42 in a duet with Gareth Gates. In 2003, she was invited as a guest to the BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs programme.

From time to time, Meera Syal’s articles are published in The Guardian.

Achievements

• 

  Meera Syal is considered one of the personalities of Asian origin who is the best-known in the United Kingdom.
  
  She has been a recipient of many awards both in acting and writing, including the Betty Trask Award, the Commission for Racial Equality's annual Race in the Media awards, and given the Nazia Hassan Foundation award. In 2015, she was given the Commander of the Order of the British Empire by the Prince of Wales.

Works

More photos

• audiobook

  • Goodness Gracious Me

    (The Britain's phenomenally successful all-Asian sketch show.)

    1999

• book

  • Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee

    (The book tells the story of Chila, a nice Punjabi girl ma...)

    1999
  • Anita and Me

    (The book tells the story of Meena, the daughter of the on...)

    1996
  • The House of Hidden Mothers

    (The author takes on the timely but underexplored issue of...)

    2015

• movie

  • Jekyll

    (Part conspiracy thriller, part comic horror, Steven Moffa...)

    2007
  • Yesterday

    (Jack discovers he is the only person on earth who remembe...)

    2019
  • Forgive and Forget

    (This insightful British film features the handsome, macho...)

    2000
  • The Brink

    (A world crisis plays out like a chess game through the pe...)

    2015
  • The Split

    (The drama series explores modern marriage and the legacy ...)

    2018
  • Beautiful Thing 1996

Views

Quotations: "Choosing whom you love is the most political decision you can make."

"Maybe that’s what love meant, both people thinking they were the lucky one."

"I had seen how in an instant, those you called friends could suddenly become tormentors, sniffing out a weakness or a difference, turning their own fear of ostracism into a weapon with which they could beat the victim away, afraid that being an outsider, and individual even, was somehow infectious."

"But I've always been a sucker for a good double entendre; the gap between what is said and what is thought, what is stated and what is implied, is a place in which I have always found myself. I'm really not a liar, I just learned very early on that those of us deprived of history sometimes need to turn to mythology to feel complete, to belong."

Membership

Meera Syal is a member of the Royal Society of Literature.

Connections

Meera Syal married a journalist Shekhar Bhatia in 1989. The family produced a daughter named Chameli. Syal and Bhatia divorced in 2002.

Three years after, in January, Syal formed a family with a British actor Sanjeev Bhaskar with whom she had starred in The Kumars at No. 42. Their son Shaan was born the same year.

Father:

Surinder Syal

Mother:

Surinder Uppal

Ex-husband:

Shekhar Bhatia

Daughter:

Chameli Bhatia

Meera Syal with her daughter Chameli (right).

husband:

Sanjeev Bhaskar

Son:

Shaan Bhaskar

colleague:

Jacqueline Shapiro