Sawyer moved to
London in 1988 to begin a career as a journalist with the magazine
Smash Hits. In 1993, she became the youngest winner of the Periodical Publishers Association Magazine Writer of the Year award for her work on
Select magazine. She wrote columns for
Time Out (1993–96) and the
Daily Mirror (2000–2003), and was a frequent contributor to
Mixmag and
The Face during the 1990s. In 2002 Sawyer was one of the curators of
New Order's box set
Retro compiling the Pop disc and contributing sleeve notes to the release. , Sawyer is a feature writer for
The Guardian and
The Observer and serves as a radio critic. Her work has been published in
GQ,
Vogue and
The Guardian and she is a regular arts critic in print, on television and on radio. She served as a member of the judging panel for the 2007
Turner Prize and the panel that awarded
Liverpool its
European Capital of Culture status in 2008. In 2004, Sawyer wrote, researched and presented an hour-long documentary for
Channel 4 about the age of consent, Writing in
The Guardian in 2003 an article entitled
Sex is not just for grown-ups she argued for the age of consent to be reduced to 12. In 2007, she presented a highly personal documentary for
More4 on
abortion rights in the US,
A Matter of Life and Death, as part of its
Travels with My Camera strand. Sawyer interviewed
Russell Brand for
The Guardian in the aftermath of
the Russell Brand Show prank calls row. She has been an occasional guest on the UK arts programme
Newsnight Review and
The Culture Show on
BBC Two, and also
BBC Radio 2 and
BBC Radio 6 Music's
Radcliffe and Maconie Show. She also took part in a celebrity edition of
BBC Two's afternoon quiz show
The Weakest Link. Her first book
Park and Ride, a travel book on the Great British
suburbs, was published by
Little, Brown and Company in 1999. Her second book
Out of Time on the
midlife crisis was published by
HarperCollins in 2016. Her third book
Uncommon People on the history of
Britpop was published by
Hachette in 2024. ==Personal life==