Michelene Wandor’s first novel, Orfeo’s Last Act, was published in 2023, and short-listed for the Society of Authors’ Paul Torday Memorial Prize. See Updates page for more details.
She is a playwright, poet, fiction writer, musician, cultural commentator and teacher of Creative Writing. Her dramatisation of The Wandering Jew was the first drama by a British woman playwright to be staged on one of the National Theatre’s main stages. Her adaptation of The Belle of Amherst (about Emily Dickinson and starring Claire Bloom) won an International Emmy for Thames TV. Her early music group, Siena, recorded the first CD in the UK of the music of Salamone Rossi Hebreo Mantovano.
Michelene’s award-winning dramas for BBC radio include Courtly Love, about Isabella d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia, and Tulips in Winer, about Spinoza. Her many dramatisations for radio include novels by Dostoevsky, Jane Austen Wilkie Collins, Daphne du Maurier, H. G. Wells, Margaret Drabble, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Nora Ephron and Sara Paretsky.
She has published three collections of short stories: Guests in the Body, False Relations and Four Times EightyOne. Her eight poetry collections include Music of the Prophets (about the resettlement of the Jews in 17th-century England) Musica Transalpina, (a Poetry Book Society Recommendation), Natural Chemistry, Travellers, and, in 2024, Ergo (see Updates page).
Her non-fiction includes Carry On, Understudies, and Look Back in Gender (both about post-war British drama), and three Creative Writing books: The Author is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else; The Art of Writing Drama, and Critical-Creative Writing – a Reader. In 2023 she published Shibboleths and Ploughshares: Music, Emotion and Meaning (see Updates page).
Currently writing: Creative Writing, English and the Imagination (For Palgrave Macmillan).
The Mirror and the Bracelet, second novel, set in Tudor England and the present: a novel in more than one genre.
Completed Cyclamen, a poetry memoir and portrait of an era.
