Fern Marie Brady

Fern Brady (born Fern Marie Brady, 26 May 1986) is a Scottish comedian, podcaster, and writer. Born in Bathgate, West Lothian, where she grew up, she is of Irish descent with family roots in County Donegal and was raised within the Catholic Church in Scotland. She achieved fame as a stand-up comedian at competitions such as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and was then invited onto panel shows such as 8 Out of 10 Cats.

While at the University of Edinburgh, Brady was editor of The Student, a weekly newspaper, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature. She originally trained to become a journalist and interned at Fest Magazine in 2009, where an assignment to write about a comedy critic trying stand-up gave her the push she needed. Her first professional gig was in May 2010. She reached the finals of So You Think You're Funny at the 2011 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, placed joint third, and went on to appear on 8 Out of 10 Cats, The Alternative Comedy Experience, Live at the Apollo, and Frankie Boyle's New World Order.

In 2020, Brady co-created the podcast Wheel of Misfortune with fellow comedian Alison Spittle for the BBC. In January 2022 she began a tour of her show Autistic Bikini Queen, and later that year was a contestant on the 14th series of Taskmaster, which she described as accidentally a really good format for autistic people. Diagnosed as autistic in 2021, she has been active in autism education and wrote about her experience in her 2023 memoir Strong Female Character, which won the non-fiction category at the Books Are My Bag Readers' Awards and the inaugural Nero book awards. Brady is bisexual and lives in London.