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Michelene Wandor

Lecturer in Creative Writing

Current Teaching

Distance Learning MA in Creative Writing

Research Interests

Michelene Wandor is a playwright, poet, fiction writer and musician. She is the first woman playwright to have had a drama on one of the National Theatre's main stages - 'The Wandering Jew', in 1987, the same year her adaptation of 'The Belle of Amherst' won an International Emmy for Thames TV.

Her prolific radio drama includes original radio plays and dramatisations (novels by Dostoyevsky, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Kipling, Sara Paretsky and Margaret Drabble), many nominated for awards. Her books on contemporary theatre include Postwar British Drama: Looking Back in Gender. In 2002 she received a Millennium Lottery Fund Award, to make a CD of the music of Salamone Rossi, early 17th century Jewish Mantuan composer.

Her poetry, Gardens of Eden Revisited and her short stories, False Relations are published by Five Leaves. She is completing a book about Creative Writing and holds a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at Birkbeck College, 2005-2007, Her new poetry collection, Musica Transalpina, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring, 2006. Her most recent dramatization for radio is Lady Chatterley's Lover, a two-part Classic Serial for Radio 4, broadcast in September, 2006.

Selected published works:

Poetry: Upbeat (Journeyman Press, 1981); Gardens of Eden Revisited (Five Leaves, 1999); Musica Transalpina (Arc, 2006: Poetry Book Society Recommendation); The Music of the Prophets (Arc, 2006).

Short stories: Tales I tell My Mother (Journeyman Press, 1978), with Zoe Fairbairns, Sara Maitland, Valerie Miner and Michele Roberts; Arky Types (Methuen, 1987) with Sara Maitland; Guests in the Body (Virago, 1986); False Relations (Five Leaves, 2004).

Drama: Five Plays (Journeyman Press, 1984); The Wandering Jew (Methuen, 1987); Wanted (Playbooks, 1988); Plays by Women (as editor and contributor, Meethuen, 1982-1985).

Books on theatre: Carry On, Understudies (Routledge, 1986); Post-War British drama: Looking Back in Gender (Routledge, 2001); The Author is not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing After Theory (Palgrave, 2007). Numerous radio plays, dramatisations and features for BBC radio and television. See website www.mwandor.co.uk.

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