Deborah Frances-White is a comedian and writer. She was born in Australia after being adopted, where she was raised as a Jehovah's Witness. After graduating from university, she ended her relationship with the Witnesses and began pursuing a career as a comedian and writer.

In her Radio 4 series broadcast last year, Deborah Frances-White Rolls the Dice, the Australian-born, British-based comedian came clean about her teens and twenties when she would knock on doors as a Sister in the Jehovah’s Witness. The broadcast caused a stir, not only winning her a Writers’ Guild Award for Best Radio Comedy, but also triggering a huge postbag from fellow ex-Witnesses about how they, too, had suffered in the fringe Christian organisation that she now unreservedly labels a religious cult.

But it prompted only one letter from an existing Witness, a 23-year-old from Vancouver, called Ryan. He had broken the rules by even listening to a podcast of her show. It is a measure, Frances-White says, of the mind-control techniques used by the Jehovah’s Witnesses that members are obliged to turn off their radios and TVs if they so much as hear their church being discussed.