Esther Freud (born 2 May 1963) is a British novelist.
Born in London, Freud is the daughter of painter Lucian Freud and Bernadine Coverley and is a great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. She travelled extensively with her mother as a child, and returned to London at the age of sixteen to train as an actress at The Drama Centre. She has worked in television and theatre as both actress and writer. Her first credited television appearance, though inauspicious, was as a terrifed diner in The Bill in 1984, running frantically out of a Chinese restaurant after it had received a bombscare. A year later she appeared as an alien in the Doctor Who serial Attack of the Cybermen. Her novels include the semi-autobiographical Hideous Kinky, which was adapted into a film starring Kate Winslet.
