Lisselle Kayla: The Pen Name Behind Carmen Harris

The EastEnders writer behind the name — and what's actually confirmed about her connection to Naomie Harris.

AdminMay 7, 2026Last Updated: July 13, 2026

4 minutes read

If you’ve searched “Lisselle Kayla” and come away more confused than when you started, that’s because you’re actually looking for two names that belong to one woman. Lisselle Kayla is the professional byline of Carmen Harris, a British-Jamaican screenwriter who spent nearly a decade in the EastEnders writers’ room before reinventing herself, later in life, as a healer. She’s also Naomie Harris’s mother — but that’s the least interesting thing about her.

Quick answer: Lisselle Kayla is the pen name Carmen Harris used for her television and radio writing career. Under that name, she wrote 26 episodes of EastEnders between 1994 and 2002, plus scripts for Grange Hill, Family Affairs, The Crouches, and the sitcom Us Girls. She’s Naomie Harris’s mother, and she has since moved into work as a certified healing practitioner.

Table of Contents

Why one writer has two names

Pen names in British television aren’t unusual, but Carmen Harris’s is confirmed in an unusually specific way: her own publisher’s biography says she has worked as a radio and TV script-writer, credited as Lisselle Kayla, for close to 30 years. Wikipedia’s entry on her BBC sitcom Us Girls states plainly that it was written by Carmen Harris under the pseudonym Lisselle Kayla. EastEnders’ own fan-run credits archive, Walford Wiki, goes further, noting that every one of her episodes for the show was written under the pen name of Lisselle Kayla, and that she started using it after emigrating from Jamaica to London as a child.

What nobody has published is why she chose a different name for her byline — whether it was a professional convention, a personal preference, or something else. That detail simply hasn’t surfaced in any credible source, so it stays unconfirmed rather than guessed at.

The EastEnders years, by the numbers

This is the part most “Naomie Harris’s mum” roundups skip entirely, probably because it takes actual digging: Carmen Harris’s episode-by-episode writing credits for EastEnders are cataloged, name by date, on Walford Wiki, which lists her contributions running from mid-December 1994 through early September 2002. Her own bio describes it as a 10-year stint as a core writer for the soap — the discrepancy between “10 years” and the roughly eight years reflected in the episode dates is worth noting rather than smoothing over, since it likely reflects when she joined the writing team versus when her name started appearing on scripts.

Alongside EastEnders, the writing credits that show up consistently across IMDb, British Comedy Guide, and Walford Wiki are:

Us Girls (BBC, early 1990s) — a sitcom about the culture gap among three generations of West Indian women, which Wikipedia confirms she wrote under the Lisselle Kayla name.
The Crouches (BBC One, 2003–2005) — a 12-episode sitcom about a Black family in south London, where British Comedy Guide credits her as one of four writers alongside series creator Ian Pattison.
Grange Hill and Family Affairs — both listed as writing credits on IMDb, Wikidata, and Walford Wiki, though without episode counts attached.
The Emerald Green Show, a BBC Radio 4 sitcom, per the old published record on British Comedy Guide.

Taken together, that’s a working TV and radio writer’s résumé spanning roughly two decades, not a footnote to someone else’s fame.

The second act: from scriptwriter to healer

Here’s the detail almost every other profile of her buries or leaves out completely: Carmen Harris stopped writing full-time and became a healer. Her publisher describes her as an intuitive and certified healing practitioner who works one-to-one with clients, teaches healing techniques in small groups, and offers free distance healing sessions once a month. A separate listing for her memoir notes that although she still writes professionally, her healing work now takes precedence.

The origin story she tells for that shift, per her own publisher bio, centers on an experience where a terminally ill young woman came out of a coma after Harris placed a hand on her — an account that comes directly from Harris’s own promotional material, not from independent verification, and should be read as her personal narrative rather than a documented medical event.

She’s also written a memoir, Sht Happens, Magic Follows (Allow It!)*, which traces this shift from scriptwriting to healing.

The Naomie Harris connection, briefly

Naomie Harris — the Moonlight and Skyfall actress — is Carmen Harris’s daughter. Wikipedia’s Naomie Harris entry confirms that her mother, credited as Lisselle Kayla, worked as a screenwriter on EastEnders and as a healer, and that Harris’s parents separated before she was born, with her mother later remarrying and having two more children. Harris was raised in a council flat in Finsbury Park and studied at the Anna Scher Theatre School as a child, though the specific claim that her mother personally enrolled her there traces to a single source and hasn’t been independently corroborated elsewhere.

What’s confirmed vs. what isn’t

Confirmed, with multiple independent sources: the Lisselle Kayla/Carmen Harris pen-name link; the EastEnders writing credit and its 1994–2002 date range; credits on Us Girls, The Crouches, Grange Hill, and Family Affairs; her current work as a healing practitioner; her relationship to Naomie Harris.

Unverified — don’t trust a source that states these as fact: her exact birth date, age, or birthplace beyond “emigrated from Jamaica as a child”; her net worth; her current city of residence; any social media accounts attributed to her. No credible outlet has published these, and figures circulating for them appear to be invented.