Joan Brady (born 1939) is a writer. She is the first woman, and so far the only American, to win the prestigious Whitbread Book of the Year Award. Other winners include Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.
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Brady was born in San Francisco, California to Mildred Edie Brady and Robert A. Brady. She has a sister Judy Brady. [1] Prior to becoming an author, she was a dancer with the San Francisco Ballet and the New York City Ballet then went on to study philosophy at Columbia University in New York. She married the late author, Dexter Masters, in 1963 and her son is author Alexander Masters, author of the acclaimed Stuart, A Life Backwards. [2] She currently lives in Oxford, England.[3]
Her second novel, Theory of War, won the prize in 1993 and was hailed as a "modern work of genius". This book also won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger and a US National Endowment for the Arts grant. It tells the story of her grandfather, a white child sold as a slave right after the Civil War when the Emancipation Proclamation meant that African Americans could no longer be sold, and so many soldiers had died in the war that there were thousands of orphans. The psychological consequences of such a background--for the slave himself and for the generations that followed him--are the main concern of the novel. Two novels followed, Death Comes for Peter Pan, an expose of medical abuse in America, and The Emigre, the adventures of a conman. Her autobiography appears under both the titles Prologue and The Unmaking of a Dancer.
Bleedout is her first thriller. She started writing crime fiction when her local Council threatened her with prison for trying to defend herself against a polluting industry. She defeated the Council in court and won a large settlement from the industry, but this personal experience of political injustice and corruption shocked her into seeking a way to expose it. Bleedout takes place against a backdrop of just such political and corporate corruption--but on a national scale--and follows two men, one a murderer, another his mentor in the process of being murdered as the action progresses. Its sequel Venom, published in 2010, introduces the theme of pharmaceutical ruthlessness in pursuit of a cure for radiation poisoning.