Fay Weldon CBE FRSL (born Franklin Birkinshaw; 22 September 1931 – 4 January 2023) was an English author, essayist and playwright.

Over the course of her 55-year writing career, she published 31 novels, including Puffball (1980), The Cloning of Joanna May (1989), Wicked Women (1995) and The Bulgari Connection (2000), but was most well-known as the writer of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983) which was televised by the BBC in 1986.

She said there were many reasons why she became a feminist, including the "appalling" lack of equal opportunities and the myth that women were supported by male relatives.

[4] Weldon described herself as a "plump, cheerful child", stating in a blog post that began as an unpublished article for the Daily Mail: "I was born large, blonde and big-boned into a family of small beautiful women.

[7] In England Weldon won a scholarship to the all-girls South Hampstead High School, before going on to study Psychology and Economics at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

[9] Weldon had temporary jobs as a waitress and hospital ward orderly before working as a clerk for the Foreign Office, where she wrote pamphlets to be dropped in Eastern Europe as part of the Cold War.

Later she took a job with Crawford's Advertising Agency, where she worked with the writer Elizabeth Smart,[10] and where she could earn enough to support herself and her young son (Nicolas).

She coined the slogan "Vodka gets you drunker quicker", saying in a Guardian interview: "It just seemed ... to be obvious that people who wanted to get drunk fast needed to know this."

"[12] She subsequently built a successful and prolific career, publishing over thirty novels, collections of short stories, films for television, newspaper and magazine articles and becoming a well-known face and voice on the BBC.

She also wrote the screenplay for the 1980 BBC miniseries adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, starring Elizabeth Garvie and David Rintoul.

Her novel The Hearts and Lives of Men was written and published in serial form, appearing in the British magazine Woman between 1 February and 15 November 1986.

The judging for that prize produced a draw between J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K and Salman Rushdie's Shame, leaving Weldon to choose between the two.

[18] Weldon was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University in West London in 2006: "A great writer needs a certain personality and a natural talent for language, but there is a great deal that can be taught – how to put words together quickly and efficiently to make a point, how to be graceful and eloquent, how to convey emotion, how to build up tension, and how to create alternative worlds."

[19] Weldon served together with Daniel Pipes as the most notable foreign members of the board of the Danish Free Press Society.

She said there were many reasons why she became a feminist, including "appalling" lack of equal opportunities and the myth that women were supported by male relatives.

In a 1998 interview for the Radio Times, Weldon stated that rape "isn't the worst thing that can happen to a woman if you're safe, alive and unmarked after the event.