Tinniswood Judges 2011
Robert Bathurst is an actor. Stage work includes plays by Shakespeare, Shaw, Wilde, Chekhov, Aphra Behn, Frayn, Gogol and Coward. His most recent London productions were Three Sisters, Whipping It Up, Blithe Spirit and, surrounded by cartoons, as Alex the banker from the Telegraph satirical strip. On TV he's been in, amongst others, Joking Apart, Cold Feet, My Dad's the Prime Minister, Downton Abbey and as John Le Mesurier in Hattie. He has been regularly on the radio in dramas, comedies and readings and has written pieces for the Independent, Telegraph and book reviews for The Tablet. He is married with four daughters and lives in Sussex.
Paul Donovan is radio columnist and previewer for The Sunday Times, and has also contributed to many other titles including the Guardian, Observer, Times, Daily Mail (for which he was an entertainments reporter and TV critic in the mid-1980s) Evening Standard and Radio Times. He wrote The Radio Companion and All Our Todays: Forty Years of Radio 4's Today programme and biographies of Roger Moore and Dudley Moore. In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography he has written the entries on several notable broadcasters including Alistair Cooke, Frank Muir, Brian Redhead, Julia Smith, John Snagge and Anona Winn. He is an occasional broadcaster and for several years convened the voting in the radio sections of the Broadcasting Press Guild awards. Educated at Queen Elizabeth's GS, Barnet, and Oriel College, Oxford, Paul is married with three children.
Nell Leyshon writes regularly for Radio 3 and 4, and her first radio play, the co-written Milk, won the Imison Award. Other plays include Soldier Boy, and Glass Eels.
Nell Leyshon’s second 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, and her play Glass Eels, was produced at Hampstead Theatre. Her play Bedlam was on at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in 2010. The Beauty Manifesto, a Connections play for the National Theatre for young people, will be produced in 2011. She is currently working on Unheard Voices, a project at the Royal Court uncovering Romany culture, and her play, Winter, will open the Gros Morne theatre festival in Newfoundland, Canada, in 2011.
Her first novel, Black Dirt (Picador) was long-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Devotion, was also published by Picador.
Nell is writer in residence with Vita Nova, who work with recovering drug addicts, and regularly teaches at Arvon Foundation. She is developing creative writing workshops in Bethlem, with mental health service users, and has experience working with many marginalised communities.