My tragic life story

A freelance journalist who specialises in interviewing pop stars and analysing popular culture, Sophie Heawood writes mainly for The Times and Independent on Sunday but has also been published in the Guardian, New Statesman, Time Out, i-D, The Huffington Post, The Week, Asiaweek, South China Morning Post, Mixmag, Plan B, PlayLouder, Careless Talk Costs Lives and Qvest.

She wrote the Tower Hamlets chapter in the recent Time Out guidebook 'London for Londoners' and won Live Music Reviewer of the Year at the Record of the Day Awards, 2007. 

To her shame, Sophie was also the voiceover artist on the 0898 gossip phonelines on two series of Big Brother and she has been on telly herself, most recently as a talking head on Channel 4's 'What Really Happened: Amy Winehouse', musing about boozing and bruising.

Sophie was born in Yorkshire in the hottest summer of the twentieth century and was such a big baby that she was thought to be twins, although she is a normal size now. No, she doesn't have a Yorkshire accent and doesn't know how to make this up to you.

She has also lived in Hong Kong, where she acted in China's first ever soap opera to feature a lesbian sub-plot, and where she accidentally became the face of Pepsi for a week, even though she kept spilling it. (This is really true.) She has since spent over a decade living beside London's Fashionable Brick Lane, though she also lives in a distinctly unfashionable part of Suffolk where her only friends are dogs. 

Sophie speaks French, Spanish and Portuguese, doesn't know how to play tennis or drive a car and is happiest when singing Total Eclipse of the Heart at karaoke. She has recently begun talking about herself in the third person.