Melissa Hemsley

Melissa Hemsley is a popular, and best-selling, British cookbook author, “real food” and sustainability advocate, and much-read food columnist. Among her five cookbooks to date are Eat Happy (2018), Eat Green (2020), and most recently, 2022’s Feel Good. She has written for a variety of British newspapers, from The Guardian to The Daily Telegraph, and is an ambassador for Fairtrade UK and a volunteer with the brilliant Felix Project, which helps to feed London residents living in food poverty. As well as having a major audience of more than 210,000 followers on Instagram, she also writes a must-read Substack newsletter.

Hemsley first found fame with her sister Jasmine in the 2010s. As Hemsley + Hemsley, they wrote their first cookbook, The Art of Eating Well, in 2014, which led to them hosting a Channel Four series called Eating Well with Hemsley + Hemsley. The pair quickly became figureheads of the emerging Clean Eating movement, developing and promoting recipes that eschew things like gluten, grains, and refined sugar.

The sisters embarked on solo careers in 2017, with Melissa opting to continue her work on advocating for clean eating, but make it as accessible as possible to those who didn’t have the time or money for some of the pair’s more involved recipes. To this end, her next book, Eat Happy, featured the kind of quick and easy recipes that have since become her trademark — no recipe takes longer than 30 minutes to make.