Best known for his novels A Boy’s Own Story and The Beautiful Room is Empty, American writer Edmund White spent six years researching his biography of Genet. In this evocative and poetic film, shot on location in Paris, he presents a highly personal and intriguing portrait of Genet which shows how the writer’s homosexuality was the major influence on his work and his life.
Colin Thubron
This programme follows the celebrated travel writer Colin Thubron into the Muslim republic of Uzbekistan. It gathers impressions of past and present, landscape and buildings, ordinary people and everyday customs. But, above all, it is a portrait of the writer himself, of the passions and hardships of his craft, of the peculiar mixture of robustness and sensitivity required of him.
Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl (1916-90) wrote books which children around the world find irresistible and which constantly ride high in the hardback and paperback children’s lists. Made with Dahl in 1986, Jack Bond’s film takes the viewer on an amazing journey, entering the writer’s magical world and revealing his extraordinary fantasies.
Catherine Cookson
Catherine Cookson (1906-98) was a writer who won a huge popular following and many of her books have been successfully dramatised for television. This programme employs an innovative combination of film and video techniques to evoke her struggle to survive an impoverished upbringing in the slums of East Jarrow. Cookson confronts her past which led to a massive and terrifying nervous breakdown many years afterwards. She talks candidly about her life and the experiences that underlie her fiction.
Patricia Highsmith
Thriller writer Patricia Highsmith, America’s first lady of crime, died in 1995. She was best-known for her creation Tom Ripley, amoral crook and killer. This film combines interviews with Highsmith alongside dramatisations from Ripley Underground.