Katy Brand is an award winning writer, comedian and actor.

She has appeared in films (Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang), TV shows (Mapp and Lucia, Peep Show, QI, Psychobitches), radio programmes (Mouth Trap, Infinite Monkey Cage, News Quiz) and live events (Victoria Wood’s Angina Monologues, The Twitter Joke Trial Benefit Gig). Between 2007 and 2009 she wrote and performed her own ITV sketch show Katy Brand’s Big Ass Show, taking it out on a live UK tour in 2010. She was a columnist for Reveal magazine for three years, and went on to write a weekly column for the Daily Telegraph.

Brand presented the Penguin Podcast for Penguin Books until  2021 and published her debut novel Brenda Monk is Funny in 2014, a story about a woman trying to establish a career as a comedian. Her debut play 3Women starring Anita Dobson opened at Trafalgar Studios in May 2018 and is published by Samuel French. This was followed by her ode to the film Dirty Dancing, I Carried a Watermelon and her latest book on common sense life lessons, Practically Perfect: Life Lessons from Mary Poppins in 2020.

In March 2020, she took the role of Miss Hedge in the West End musical Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.

 

The 2018 Women's Prize for Fiction judges