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UK playwright & fiction writer

Nell Mary Dunn (born 9 June 1936) is an English playwright, screenwriter and author. She is known especially for a volume of short stories, Up the Junction, and a novel, Poor Cow.

Dunn was born in London the second daughter of Baronet Sir Philip Dunn, the son of Baronet James Hamet Dunn, she is the maternal granddaughter of the 5th Earl of Rosslyn, She was educated at a convent up to the age of 14. She and her older sister Serena were evacuated to America during the Second World War. Her parents divorced in 1944. Despite her upper class background, Dunn moved in 1959 to Battersea, made friends there and worked for a time in a confectionery factory. This milieu inspired much of what Dunn would later write. She attended the Courtauld Institute of Art.

After her marriage to Jeremy Sandford in 1957, they gave up their smart Chelsea home and went to live in unfashionable Battersea where they joined and observed the lower strata of society. From this experience he published the play Cathy Come Home in 1963, and she wrote Up the Junction. Dunn came to notice with the publication of Up the Junction (1963), a series of short stories set in South London, some of which had already appeared in the New Statesman. The book, awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, was a controversial success at the time for its vibrant, realistic and non judgemental portrait of its working class protagonists. It was adapted for television by Dunn, with Ken Loach, for The Wednesday Play series, directed by Loach and broadcast in November 1965. A cinema film version was released in 1968. Talking to Women (1965) was a collection of interviews with nine friends, "from society heiresses to factory workers (Dunn herself was both)". The interviewees included Edna O’Brien, Pauline Boty, Ann Quin and Paddy Kitchen.