Joan Brady (American-British writer)
| Joan Brady Masters | |
|---|---|
| Born | Joan Brady December 4, 1939 San Francisco, California, United States |
| Pen name | Joan Brady |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | United States |
| Citizenship | British |
| Period | 1979-Present |
| Genre | Biography, suspense fiction |
| Notable works | Theory of War |
| Spouse | Dexter Masters (1909-1989) |
| Children | Alexander Masters (son) |
| Relatives | Mildred Edie Brady (mother), Robert A. Brady (father) |
| Website | |
| www |
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Joan Brady (born 4 December 1939 in San Francisco, California) is an American-British writer. She is the first woman and American to win the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for her novel Theory of War.
Born Joan Brady on December 4, 1939 in San Francisco, California to Mildred Edie Brady and Robert A. Brady. She has one sister, Judy. Before 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. In 1963, she married author Dexter Masters, her mother's former secret lover. In 1965 they moved to England, and together had a son, Alexander Masters, who authored Stuart: A Life Backwards. Her husband died in 1989, and she currently lives in Oxford, England.
Her first published book was The Impostor in 1979. In 1982, she published her autobiography, that appears under both the titles The Unmaking of a Dancer and Prologue: An Unconventional Life'.
Her third book and second novel, Theory of War, was hailed as a "modern work of genius" and earned the Whitbread Novel of the Year award, as well as the Whitbread Book of the Year award. 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.
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