Samantha Ellis

Samantha Ellis is a British playwright and writer best known for her book How to be a Heroine and her play How to Date a Feminist.

Early life
Ellis was born in London to Iraqi-Jewish parents. She studied English at Queens' College, Cambridge.

Career and works
Ellis's play The Candy Jar was produced at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1996. She worked as a journalist, and wrote a column on theatrical history for The Guardian newspaper.

Her play Patching Havoc was produced at Theatre503 in 2003. Her radio play Sugar and Snow, set in the Kurdish community in north London, was produced on BBC Radio 4 in 2006 and given a reading at the Hampstead Theatre. Her short play A Sudden Visitation of Calamity was produced at Menagerie Theatre in 2008. In 2010 her play The Thousand and Second Night was produced by LAMDA. In 2010 her play Cling To Me Like Ivy, published by Nick Hern Books, was produced by the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and went on tour. In 2012 she was a founder member of women's theatre company Agent 160.

Her book How to be a Heroine was published by Chatto & Windus in January 2014, and her biography of Anne Brontë Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life was published in January 2017.