Broadcasting Group

Committee

Biographies

David Docherty (Chair) is a businessman, novelist, academic and columnist for Broadcast and the Guardian. As the Deputy Managing Director of Television, he was responsible for all the UKTV channels, BBC America, BBC Prime and for establishing BBC Three. As the BBC's first Director of New Media, he ran the team setting up bbc.co.uk, Europe's most successful content web site. He also served as a Member of the Board of Management.

He left the BBC in 2000 to lead Telewest's push into broadband media, and he was creatively responsbile for BlueYonder, Telewest's award-winning broadband portal. He then moved on to became chief executive of YooMedia, the UK's biggest independent interactive media group He left YooMedia in 2005 to develop a new convergence media company. He is Chairman of the University of Luton’s Board of Governors, and has served on several government committees on the future of media. He also served as a committee member of the Royal Television Society. His novels include: The Fifth Season, The Killing Jar and The Spirit Death. Non-fiction consists of The Last Picture Show, Running the Show: 21 years of London Weekend Television and Violence in Television Fiction.

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.

Nell Leyshon's first radio play, the co-written Milk, won the Imison Award. She adapted her play, The Farm for a Friday night play, and her novel, Black Dirt, for Radio 3. She has also written original dramas including a radio version of Glass Eels, The House in the Trees, and Soldier Boy, about a soldier returning form the Iraq war. The Home Field was a drama documentary for Radio 3.

Nell’s stage play Comfort Me with Apples won the 2005 Charles Wintour Award for most promising playwright in the Evening Standard Awards, and was shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award.  In 2007 her adaptation of Don’t Look Now was produced at Sheffield and the Lyric Hammersmith, her play Glass Eels, was produced at Hampstead Theatre, and a new one act play, Winter, appeared in a double bill in Newfoundland, Canada, followed by a UK tour.

Nell’s first novel, Black Dirt, is published by Picador, and was long-listed for the Orange Prize. She is currently writer in residence at Vita Nova, a theatre company working with with recovering drug addicts, and is involved in the project Unheard Voices, at the Royal Court, which explores the Romany community.

Anne Sebba's first job was in the Arabic Services of the BBC. She left this for Reuters in London and Rome where for six years she worked as a foreign correspondent and made regular news broadcasts for LBC. Since then she has pursued a freelance career as a writer, lecturer and broadcaster.

In 2003 Anne proposed and was Associate Producer for the Channel 4 award-winning documentary, The Saint Making Business and in 2008 Anne was consultant for Lady Randy; Churchill’s Mother, also Channel 4, which used her latest biography Jennie Churchill, Winston’s American Mother, published by John Murray in UK and WW Norton in US.

Anne has written nine non-fiction books including Battling For News: The Rise of the Woman Reporter, The Exiled Collector, William Bankes and the Making of an English Country House Enid Bagnold: A Life; Laura Ashley: A Life by Design; Mother Teresa, Beyond the Image. Her books have been translated into Czech, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Japanese and Zulu. Anne has an interest in the future of biographies in the digital age and has addressed a British Library Multidisciplinary Colloquium on Memory where scientists and doctors examined the issue with writers and broadcasters. In 2009 Anne is writing and presenting a documentary for Radio 3 about the pianist, Harriet Cohen. She has written a number of short stories and a radio play about the 1833 trial of William Bankes.

She is on the Executive of English PEN, a member of the Richmond Arts Council Books Advisory Committee and is a trustee of YAD, a charity that aims to bring Palestinians and Israelis together through culture. She has judged several prizes for fiction and non fiction as well as the Biographer's Club prize for an unpublished proposal by a first time author. She has contributed to a variety of radio and television programmes including Start the Week, Woman's Hour and the Richard and Judy show.
www.annesebba.com

Nick Warburton has written scripts for stage, television and radio. He’s published children’s novels, short stories and stage plays, and has run courses on writing both here and abroad, particularly in the Middle East. Touch Wood was produced at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in 2007 and two linked plays under the title of Smoking Gun appeared there and toured in 2008.

His radio play Beast won the Peter Tinniswood Award for the best radio play of 2006. Witness, a five-part adaptation of St Luke’s gospel for BBC Radio Four, was broadcast in December 2007 and will be published on CD in 2009.

His television work includes scripts for Doctors, EastEnders, Born and Bred and Holby City. He was the guest interviewee on Test Match Special during the Headingley Test in 2007.

Nazrin Choudhury is a writer working across film, television and radio. She embarked on her writing career after winning a 'Focus on Talent' award for her screenplay Scum and went on to complete an MA in Screenwriting at the Northern Film School following a Channel 4 Drama award. Since then she has written for several television shows including EastEnders, Doctors, Casualty and Waterloo Road as well as developing her own authorial drama work for both the screen and radio. Her first radio play, Mixed Blood, won the 2005 Imison Award and she is also the recipient of an Arts Council award for her novel My England. She also works as a professional actress and is currently developing a number of original projects.

Alison Joseph 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.

She is currently working on a Hebridean drama for BBC Radio Scotland, as well as the next novel.
http://alisonjoseph.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

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

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.

Colin Teevan is a stage, radio and screenwriter. 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 Kafka’s Monkey (Young Vic), Don Quixote (West Yorkshire Playhouse), Peer Gynt (National Theatre of Scotland/Barbican) and Svejk (Gate Theatre/ Duke, Broadway).

His 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 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 (2007). He has written on many aspects of theatre including translating for the stage, adaptation, contemporary Irish Theatre and international, cross-disciplinary collaboration. He is currently developing two new feature drama serials for BBC TV and RTE, Dublin. He is currently Lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London.
 

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