Michelene Wandor is a playwright, poet, short story writer, cultural commentator, musician and teacher of Creative Writing. Her dramatisation of Eugene Sue’s The Wandering Jew was the first drama by a British woman playwright to be staged on one of the National Theatre’s main stages. With her early music group, Siena, she produced the first CD in the UK of the music of Salamone Rossi Hebreo Mantovano.
Her award-winning dramas for BBC radio include Courtly Love, about Isabella d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia, and Tulips in Winter, about Spinoza. Her many dramatisations for radio include those by Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Daphne du Maurier, H. G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, Margaret Drabble and Sara Paretsky.
She has published three collections of short stories, Guests in the Body, False Relations and Four Times EightyOne. Her seven poetry collections include Musica Transalpina (a Poetry Book Society Recommendation), Natural Chemistry and Travellers. Her non-fiction books include Look Back in Gender: Sexuality and the Family in Post-War British Drama, and three Creative Writing books: the first history of creative writing in the UK, The Author is not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else; The Art of Writing Drama and Critical-Creative Writing – Two Sides of the Same Coin: a Reader.
Her first novel, Orfeo’s Last Act, is published in 2023. Details below.
