I am a playwright, poet and occasional visual artist, who lives in a shambling Victorian house on a very steep hill in Wellhouse, near Huddersfield, with my wife Kim (who is a community artist and historian) and one daughter: my other, elder daughter lives in Bradford and is training to be a counsellor. My father is a classical musician and my grandfather was a sailor.
For thirteen years, I was director of Chol Theatre, the pioneering inter-cultural company based in Batley, West Yorkshire, and travelled to Bangladesh, India, Denmark and Poland working for the company. The name ‘Chol’ means ‘the sound of water lapping against the side of a boat’ or ‘Get going!’ in Bengali.
I have written about a lot of imaginary boat journeys! I have a particular interest in Bangladeshi and Polish culture.
Three years ago, I stopped working for the theatre company to take the risk of becoming a freelance writer. I’ve always written but lots of other things seemed to be getting in the way and I’ve only really been a ‘serious’ writer since 1998. My paid writing is mainly playwriting commissions and working in education but I’m very happy, and very slow, when writing poetry - and pretty happy (and quite fast!) when writing non-fiction prose. I often combine poetry, dialogue and prose in my writing.
My first poetry collection, ‘An Indian Rug Surprised by Snow, was published by Wrecking Ball Press in May 2005 and recently I have been touring with Indian musicians, promoting the book through a programme of readings and raags. We have just made a CD, which will be available towards the end of October. Currently, I am the Poet in Residence for Ilkley Literature Festival.
For the past three years, I’ve been teaching creative writing courses to undergraduate students at the University of Leeds, been ‘reader in residence’ for Booktrust in schools and libraries in Yorkshire and the Humber, and I’ve been writing about urban regeneration and people’s life stories for Loca and Interculture. I’m currently scripting and directing an educational DVD, ‘Double Portraits’, which brings together Holocaust Survivors and refugees, and features six specially commissioned poems.
My preferred kinds of work are writing plays with groups of people based on their own experiences and poetry or prose which connects with the visual arts or my meetings with people from different cultures. I get most demand for writing large cast, youth theatre plays about contemporary issues: in the past two and a half years, I have written six of these including a ‘science fiction’ one about life for young people after the race riots in Burnley, Lancashire; another which told the story of a Kurdish asylum seeker from Syria and his stay in detention in the UK and a play about young people’s attitudes to Islam and terrorism. That all sounds very serious but I’m known for my ability to put humour into my plays, however serious the subject! I have just finished a play called ‘Raining old women and sticks’ for North Wales Stage, which is in Punjabi, Welsh and English. It will be performed by a professional cast of five and will tour North Wales and the north of England in February and March 2006.
Oh, incidentally, the first seven or so years of my working life were spent doing very risky outdoor theatre spectacles (I used to set myself on fire a lot) and touring with horses, carts, a marquee and masks all over the British Isles with ‘Horse and Bamboo Theatre’. This has given me a lifelong interest in Gypsies and travellers. Recently, I’ve been working on the Gypsy site in Baildon, near Bradford, on a reading and writing project which included making a life size wooden horse!
The biggest influences on me? In theatre, Tadeusz Kantor, the Polish visual artist and director from Krakow; Shakespeare (especially the late plays) and Jacobean revenge dramas…oh, I was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and went to ‘Shakespeare’s school’, but didn’t like it much because I was forced to study science there, and I have been rebelling ever since. I love loads of poets but maybe I’ll mention Sujata Bhatt, Alice Oswald, Gary Snyder, Tomas Transtromer, Pablo Neruda, Ted Hughes and Rabindranath Tagore…but it would be easy to make a very long list. In prose, I’m a big fan of Marquez and Don DeLillo. I read loads of poetry and novels but hardly any plays because I’m too busy writing them.
