Joan Brady - Author

Portrait and interview - 1994

Two years after the death of her husband Dexter Masters in 1989, Joan returned to writing and her book Theory of War was published by André Deutsch in 1993.  Joan was the first woman and, so far the only American, to win Britain's prestigious 1993 Whitbread Book of the Year Award for this highly acclaimed work, a novel highlighting the grim period following the American Civil War when white children were sold into slavery.  This book also won the French Prix de Meilleur Livre Étranger and was awarded a US National Endowment for the Arts grant.

Joan's paternal grandfather, Nathaniel, was just such a child, sold by a Union soldier, to a tobacco farmer at the age of four for $15.  The protagonist of Theory of War, Jonathan Carrick, is closely modelled on Nathaniel, who died before she was born.  Jonathan's attempted murder of George, the son of his owner, before running away at sixteen, is also based on Nathaniel Brady's life.  Jonathan suffers such indignities as having his teeth extracted to be sold at $2 a tooth in England

Joan was born in San Francisco in 1939.  Her father was Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley and her mother was a journalist in the field of consumer economics.  Both her brother and sisters are writers.

Joan studied ballet at the San Francisco Ballet School and when she was fourteen was given her first small part in the opera Aida.  She danced with the San Francisco Ballet Company for the next three years then went to New York, studied at George Balanchine's School of American Ballet and danced with the New York City Ballet in 1960.

From 1961 to 1965, she attended Columbia University, where she majored in Philosophy and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.  During this time, she married, a writer who was then Editorial Director of the Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports (the father of Which?).  Their son Alexander Masters was born in 1965; the same year that the three of them moved to England in part to educate Alexander, who went to English Schools and gained a First in Physics at King's College in London.

It was during the 70s that Joan had started writing, and published two short stories before George Braziller (US) brought out her first novel in 1979.  Harper and Row published her second book The Unmaking of a Dancer, in 1982; Pocket Books brought out a paperback edition the following year.

Update:  Joan lived in Totnes for over twenty years before moving to Oxford.  She died from a heart attack on 13th June, 2024 aged 84.