Piers Paul Read - Work

Work

Early in his career, Read wrote a number of scripts for film and television – Verbrechen mit Vorbedacht (1967) for the German director Peter Lilienthal whom he met in Berlin; Coincidence (1970), The House on Highbury Hill (1971) and The Childhood Friend (1974) /as Wednesday Plays for BBC television – the latter starring Anthony Hopkins who would also play the title role in the television adaptation of Read’s A Married Man (1984). A short play The Class War was staged by the Questors Theatre Company in 1964, and his Margaret Clitherow was broadcast by Granada Television in 1977.

The greater part of Read’s work has been in prose form. After his plotless first novel, Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx (1967), Read’s fiction adopted a more traditional narrative structure with both contemporary and historical settings. Three of his historical novels – The Junkers (1968), Polonaise (1976), The Free Frenchman (1986), are set in Continental Europe around World War II; and Alice in Exile (2001) in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution . Read’s contemporaneous novels – A Married Man (1979), A Season in the West (1988), and The Misogynist (2010) - are ironic critiques of the manners and morals of the English upper-middle classes. There are elements of the thriller in The Villa Golitsyn (1981), On the Third Day (1990), A Patriot in Berlin (1995), Knights of the Cross (1997) and The Death of a Pope (2009), though these too show Read’s historical, political and religious concerns. With Alive. The Story of the Andes Survivors (1974), The Train Robbers (1978), and Ablaze. The Story of Chernobyl (1993) Read extended his range to reportage; to history with The Templars (1999) and The Dreyfus Affair (2012); and to biography with Alec Guinness. The Authorised Biography (2003). He has also contributed to moral and religious controversies with a pamphlet Quo Vadis. The Subversion of the Catholic Church (1991), and essays and articles collected in Hell and Other Destinations (2006).

Read was awarded the Sir Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for The Junkers; the Hawthornden Prize and Somerset Maugham Award for Monk Dawson; the Thomas More Medal for Alive; the Enid McLeod Award for The Free Frenchman; and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for A Season in the West. Read’s novels A Married Man (1984) and The Free Frenchman (1988) were adapted for television; Alive was made into a feature film by the director Frank Marshal in 1993; and Monk Dawson by Tom Waller in 1998.