Alison Joseph (Chair) is a London-based crime writer and radio dramatist. She started her career as a television researcher, then director, in documentaries, mostly for Channel 4. In 1993 she became a writer full-time. Alison has written about twenty works for radio, including The True Story and One Down, which was an interactive daily drama with input via a website. She has also done various dramatisations, including Georges Simenon’s Maigret, and abridgements for Book at Bedtime and Book of the Week on Radio 4. She is the author of the series of novels featuring Sister Agnes, a contemporary detective nun based in South London. The ninth in the series, A Violent Act, has just been published in hardback. Sister Agnes has also featured in her own drama series on BBC Radio 4. All the Sister Agnes books are now available as e-books. Alison is currently working on a radio comedy series starring June Whitfield, co-written with Andy Merriman, to be broadcast in 2011. Her next crime novel, a departure from Sister Agnes, is about particle physics.
http://alisonjoseph.com
Mike Bartlett’s first stage play My Child was received with great critical acclaim at the Royal Court in May 2007 and that autumn Not Talking, his play for Radio 3, won both the Tinniswood and Imison Awards. His original series for Radio 4, The Family Man, was broadcast in June 2007 and Love Contract, also for Radio 4, was broadcast in November, and nominated for the Tinniswood Award in 2008. Other radio work includes, Liam for the Woman’s Hour serial and The Steps for Radio 3. He won the Old Vic New Voices Award for his stage play Artefacts which premiered at The Bush Theatre in February 2008 before a national tour, and New York transfer. Most recently his stage play Cock, starring Ben Whishaw, has sold out its entire run at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs.
Lucy Caldwell is a novelist, playwright and radio dramatist. Her plays and radio dramas include Leaves, Guardians, Girl From Mars (for which she won the 2009 Imison Award) and Avenues of Eternal Peace. Lucy’s latest play, Notes to Future Self, will premiere in 2011 in a production by Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and she is currently working on a commission for the Royal Court Theatre. Her second novel The Meeting Point (Faber), has recently won the £30,000 University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize.
www.lucycaldwell.com
Nazrin Choudhury is an award-winning writer working across film, television and radio. She has scripted episodes of popular TV serials such as Casualty, Doctors, Eastenders and Waterloo Road as well as working on Coronation Street and as series story consultant for the BBC World Service Trust drama, Bishaash. Her first screenplay, Scum, won a 'Focus on Talent' award with DNA films and her critically acclaimed radio play Mixed Blood went on to win the 2005 Imison award. She is a recipient of an Arts Council of England award for her novel My England and most recently worked with award-winning director, Menhaj Huda, on his new film Everywhere and Nowhere.
Christopher William Hill is a radio dramatist and playwright. His plays for BBC Radio 4 include Killing Maestros, Accolades, Suing Mr Spargo, Hindenburg and Love Me, Liberace. He is currently writing The Schwartzgarten Tales, a series of children’s books to be published by Orchard.
Karen Liebreich studied at the European University Institute in Florence, received a history doctorate from Cambridge, and then worked as cultural assistant at the French Institute in London before going into television. She worked as a researcher and producer on TV documentaries, including The Royal Navy and The Great Ships for the History Channel, and several BBC series, including Timewatch, Cinema Europe and The Last Exodus (Critics' Gold Medal at the New York Film Festival), also writing books for the BBC on business and skiing.
The Complete Skier (BBC Books), became the website www.ifyouski.com. From 1996 she ran The Baby Directory, a publishing and website parenting business which she sold in 2002. Her recent books include The Letter in the Bottle (Atlantic 2006), and Fallen Order (Atlantic 2004). She also project-managed the BBC Masterclasses, an interactive media project for the BBC, and consulted on the Virtual Curriculum. She is a trustee for environmental charities The Dukes Meadows Trust, and the Chiswick House Kitchen Garden. The Family Kitchen Garden will be published in the UK and US in May 2009.
www.karenliebreich.com
Sue Limb grew up in Cheltenham, where her father worked for GCHQ and her mother was a Primary School teacher. The repressed 1950s gave Sue a sense of the subversive power of comedy, but though at Cambridge she directed plays and performed in Footlights, she never imagined she would be able to write for a living. On graduation, Sue started researching for a PhD in Elizabethan Literature but abandoned it eventually to teach English and Drama in a comprehensive school. It wasn’t until she was thirty that she dared to give in her notice, moved to London and lived a Bridget Jonesy life in a bedsit in Earl’s Court, writing quizzes and features for women’s and teenage magazines.
Her first books were a biography of Captain Oates (deriving from a teenage passion for Antarctica – a touch of Adriana Mole) and the novel Up The Garden Path, which eventually became a radio and a TV series, starring Imelda Staunton. Sue has always loved writing dialogue and the best known of her comedy series for Radio 4 was probably The Wordsmiths at Gorsemere, a Lake Poets parody. In 1989 she was invited to write a domestic column for The Guardian’s new Weekend section. This chronicle of domestic mayhem, Dulcie Domum’s Bad Housekeeping, continued for thirteen years.
Most recently Sue has been writing comic novels for children and young adults – the Ruby Rogers series and Girl 15, Charming but Insane and sequels, all published by Bloomsbury. She lives on a remote farm in Gloucestershire and has one daughter.
www.suelimb.co.uk
Karl Sabbagh read Natural Sciences at King’s College, Cambridge, and went into BBC Radio as a General Trainee. He then became a television documentary producer, director and writer, first in the BBC and then as an independent producer making programmes and series for the BBC and Channel 4 in the U.K. and PBS in the United States. He has produced programmes for Horizon and Timewatch on the BBC and Equinox and Dispatches on Channel 4. His major series include The Body in Question, with Jonathan Miller, The Living Body and Strangers Abroad for Central Television, and Magic or Medicine?, Skyscraper, 21st Century Jet, and Power into Art for Channel 4. He also presented several editions of the Radio 4 series Science Now, in the 1980s.
Karl turned several of his television projects into non-fiction books before turning to full-time writing of books and articles. He has written for the Guardian, the Times and Sunday Times, Prospect, the London Review of Books, and many other newspapers and periodicals. He has also written ten books, including A Rum Affair, Dr Riemann’s Zeroes, Palestine: A Personal History, Your Case is Hopeless, and Remembering Our Childhood. His latest book, The Hair of the Dog, was BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week in December, 2009, and he is currently editing A Book of King’s, about King’s College, Cambridge.
John Taylor runs Fiction Factory, an independent production company which specialises in drama and whose “landmark” productions include dramatisations of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time novels, and Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. He has written for children’s theatre and his radio plays include A Darker Sister, Love's Executioner, Letters from the Ice Land, Lost Girls, The Villa Madeira, Markheim, and Rage on the Road.
Colin Teevan is a stage, radio and screenwriter and lectures on Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has written many plays for BBC Radios 3 and 4, including Tricycles, Iph..., How Many Miles to Basra, Myrrha, The Roykeaneiad, The Devil Was Here Yesterday and Glass Houses.
Plays include The Lion of Kabul (Tricycle Theatre, Great Game Season) How Many Miles to Basra? (West Yorkshire Playhouse, winner of Clarion Best Play 2007) Amazonia (with Paul Heritage for the Young Vic), The Diver and The Bee (both with Hideki Noda for Soho Theatre and Setagaya Theatre, Tokyo), Monkey! (Young Vic, West Yorkshire, Dundee Rep and Scottish Dance Theatres), Missing Persons: Four Tragedies and Roy Keane (Assembly Rooms/Trafalgar Studios) Alcmaeon in Corinth (Live! Theatre, Newcastle) and The Walls (National Theatre).
Adaptations include two runs of Kafka’s Monkey (Young Vic), Don Quixote (West Yorkshire Playhouse), Peer Gynt (National Theatre of Scotland/Barbican) and Svejk (Gate Theatre/ Duke, Broadway).
Translations include Bacchai (National Theatre), Iph… (Lyric Theatre, Belfast) from the Greek of Euripides and Cuckoos and Marathon (Gate Theatre) from modern Italian.
His stage work is published by Oberon Books. Colin has also written on many aspects of theatre including translating for the stage, adaptation, contemporary Irish Theatre and international, cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Colin is currently developing two new feature drama serials for BBC TV and RTE, Dublin and has written scripts for the second series of ITV's Vera, starring Brenda Blethyn. The Bee is returning to Soho Theare in January and a new play will perform at the Tricycle Theatere in February 2012.
Follow Colin on Twitter: @TeevanColin
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