Short answers, pulled from the story.
M.I.A., born Mathangi Arulpragasam on the 18th of July 1975, is a British singer, rapper, songwriter, record producer, and activist born in Hounslow, London. She is the daughter of a Sri Lankan Tamil engineer and activist father and a seamstress mother, and spent much of her early childhood in Jaffna, northern Sri Lanka, before returning to London as a refugee at age eleven.
M.I.A. is an initialism that stands for both "Missing in Action" and "Missing in Acton." She adopted the name while living in the Acton area of west London and searching for a cousin who had gone missing during the Sri Lankan Civil War.
"Paper Planes", a single from her 2007 album Kala, is M.I.A.'s most commercially successful song. It peaked at number four on the US Billboard Hot 100, sold three times platinum in the US and Canada, and by November 2011 had sold 3.6 million copies in the US. It earned a Grammy nomination for Record of the Year at the 51st Annual Grammy Awards and became XL Recordings' second best-selling single.
The NFL filed a lawsuit against M.I.A. after she extended her middle finger to the camera during her performance of "Give Me All Your Luvin'" at the Super Bowl XLVI halftime show. The league sought millions in damages and demanded a public apology. The lawsuit was settled in August 2014 under private terms.
M.I.A. received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Song for "O... Saya", her collaboration with composer A.R. Rahman for Danny Boyle's film Slumdog Millionaire. The nomination made her the first person of South Asian descent to be nominated for both an Academy Award and a Grammy Award in the same year.
M.I.A. was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for her services to music.