Laura Coryton

Laura Coryton MBE (born 1993) is a British campaigner, feminist activist and author. She is the founder of Stop Taxing Periods, a campaign to abolish the tampon tax in the United Kingdom and make menstrual products exempt from VAT. Coryton's online petition successfully lobbied the UK Parliament into establishing the Tampon Tax Fund in 2016, through which almost £100m was donated to female-focused charities. Her campaign succeeded in 2021 when the tax on all period products was axed.

Coryton also runs the Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) social enterprise Sex Ed Matters, dedicated to making quality and confidence-building sex education accessible to everyone, for which she won UKRI's Young Innovator Award 2023 and Women in Innovation Award 2024. In the 2024 UK general election, she stood as the Labour Party parliamentary candidate for Richmond Park. Her first book Speak Up! was published by Harper Collins UK in 2019, translated into French in 2021 and in the USA in 2022.

For her work, she was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2024 New Year Honours for services to Charitable Campaigning. Coryton also joined the Obama Foundation as a European Leader in 2022, joined the Department for Education's Period Poverty Taskforce in 2020, and was named one of The Observer's and Nesta's 2016 New Radicals. In December 2016, the BBC included her in their list of Five women who aren't on Wikipedia but should be.