Joan Smith

Novelist and columnist

Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. After graduating from Reading University in the 1970s she worked as a radio journalist in Manchester, and thereafter she was with The Sunday Times until 1984. She is a regular Guardian columnist now, but regularly contributes book reviews to The Times. She also co-presents What the Papers Say and regularly appears on BBC radio, as well as contributing to The Independent, the Independent on Sunday, and the New Statesman.

Smith is a former chair of the Writers in Prison committee for English PEN, and in 2003, she was offered an MBE for her services to PEN, which she declined. She is also a novelist, perhaps best known for her five-book series of Loretta Lawson crime novels. Her novel What Will Survive (2008) concerns a journalist’s investigation into the deaths of a model and an anti-landmine campaigner.