Changemakers: Meera Syal

Actor, comedian and writer Meera Syal discusses her trailblazing career with Anita Anand.
Meera Syal will talk about creativity, comedy, breaking down barriers and amplifying unheard voices across her multi-faceted career with broadcaster Anita Anand.
Meera Syal CBE is an award-winning British actor, comedian and writer. She is widely known for co-writing and acting in the multi award-winning comedy series Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at Number 42. Her many other film and TV credits include Yesterday, Paddington 2 and Broadchurch, alongside an extensive theatre career with leading roles at The National Theatre, The Old Vic and the Royal Court.
Her semi-autobiographical first novel Anita and Me was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, won the Betty Trask Award and is the first novel by a British Asian writer to be included on the national school’s curriculum, as well as being adapted into a screenplay. Other writing credits include the screenplay for the acclaimed film Bhaji On The Beach and co-writing Bombay Dreams, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bollywood-themed musical.
Syal was awarded an MBE in 1997 and a CBE for her services to drama and literature in 2015. In 2023 she was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Women in Film & Television Awards and in the same year, the BAFTA Fellowship at the BAFTA Television Awards.
Chair: Anita Anand is an award-winning radio and television journalist. She currently presents Any Answers, PM and The Reith Lectures on BBC Radio 4. Anita is also the author of Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond with William Dalrymple and The Patient Assassin, for which she won the Penn Hessell Tiltman Award for History Book of The Year. She is a patron of The Museum of Richmond, and a member of the advisory board of the Oxford Centre for Global History. Anand was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of London in 2024. She presents the internationally acclaimed Empire podcast with William Dalrymple which has over 45 million downloads to date.
Changemakers is a series of conversations with women across the cultural sector, highlighting how their work has shifted narratives, broken down barriers, and generated change across the arts.
The series is inspired by the RA’s recent Angelica Kauffman exhibition which highlighted Kauffman’s role as a pioneering artist — one of only two female founding members of the Royal Academy.