Joan Anita Barbara Armatrading, CBE (/ˈɑːrməˌtreɪdɪŋ/, born 9 December 1950) is a Kittitian-English singer-songwriter and guitarist. A three-time Grammy Award nominee, Armatrading has also been nominated twice for BRIT Awards as Best Female Artist. She received an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contemporary Song Collection in 1996.

In a recording career spanning nearly 50 years, Armatrading has released 20 studio albums, as well as several live albums and compilations.

Joan Armatrading, the third of six children, was born in 1950 in the town of Basseterre in what was then the British colony Saint Christopher and Nevis.Her father was a carpenter and her mother a housewife. When she was three years old, her parents moved with their two eldest boys to Birmingham in England, sending Joan to live with her grandmother on the Caribbean island of Antigua.^[6] In early 1958, at the age of seven, she joined her parents in Brookfields, then a district of Birmingham. (The area, now mostly demolished, has been absorbed into the district of Hockley.) Her father had played in a band in his youth, later forbidding his children from touching his guitar. At about the age of 14 Armatrading began writing songs by setting her own limericks to music on a piano that her mother had purchased as “a piece of furniture” Armatrading then began teaching herself guitar after her mother had bought her one that was worth £3 (equivalent to £59 in 2020) from a pawn shop in exchange for two prams.