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Joan Brady danced with the New York City Ballet before taking a degree in philosophy at Columbia University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She married, moved to England and published her first novel in 1979. In 1986 she was awarded a grant from the United States National Endowment for the Arts to finance her second novel Theory of War. This novel became an international best-seller and was translated into nine languages; in 1993 it won the UK’s prestigious Whitbread Book of the Year Award —Brady was the first woman ever to win this Award—as well as the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and France’s coveted Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (other winners include Nabokov, Auden, Updike, Garcia Marquez).
As a writer Brady has been compared to Jack London, John Steinbeck and Angela Carter amongst others. She is the author of short stories, articles, reviews, a highly acclaimed autobiography, Prologue (The Unmaking of a Dancer in the US), a fictionalised account of a US medical scandal, Death Comes for Peter Pan, and a best-selling novel, The Émigré. In 2001, she represented England at the Centenary of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Her latest book Bleedout marks a change in direction; it is a thriller that has been brought out simultaneously in the US and the UK. Foreign editions so far include Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, the Netherlands and Poland.
She lives in Oxford, where she is writing a sequel to Bleedout for Simon & Schuster in the UK and the USA.