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.

Her second novel, Theory of War, won the prize in 1993. This book also won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger and was awarded a US National Endowment for the Arts grant. Two novels followed, Death Comes for Peter Pan and The Emigre. Her autobiography appears under both the titles Prologue and The Unmaking of a Dancer.

Bleedout is her first thriller; its sequel will be published early in 2009. She started writing crime fiction because her local Council took her to court 15 times for trying to defend herself against glue fumes from a neighboring workshop. The injustice made her so angry she wanted to line people up against a wall and machine gun them. Instead she wrote the book and dedicated it to the Council. She has since won a court case on the matter.

She was born in San Francisco, California and was a dancer with the San Francisco Ballet and the New York City Ballet before studying at Columbia University in New York. She married the late author, Dexter Masters, in 1963. She currently lives in Devon, England.

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