Musician, Poet, Playwright, Journalist
Alan Franks is an award-winning author, musician and journalist with many plays, records and poems to his name. In the past four years his poems have won several prizes, including last year’s inaugural Wigtown Competition, Scotland’s largest, and the Petra Kenney Award, judged by poet laureate Andrew Motion. Before writing poetry he composed and performed songs with the singer Patty Vetta. They have made hundreds of appearances at clubs, festivals and on radio, and the first of their four CDs, “Will” was named by Time Out as one of the top “Roots” albums of 1995.
One of the songs, The Wishfulness Waltz, became the title track of a collection by the veteran folk-rock band, Fairport Convention.
He also performs his poems regularly at jazz clubs, and is collaborating as a lyricist with the tenor saxophonist and composer, Tim Whitehead.His most recent plays are Previous Convictions, at Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre, and The Edge of the Land, which made a three-month tour of eastern England.
His others include The Mother Tongue at Greenwich Theatre, starring Prunella Scales, and Our Boys, with Beatty Edney. His latest play, Augusta, featuring Brazilian film star Antonia Frering, is due to be produced in London this year. His prose fiction includes the novel Boychester’s Bugle, published by Heinemann and New English Library, and the novella “Going Over,” which won a competition run by the “New Writer” magazine.
As a journalist, he has written for The Times for nearly thirty years. During that time he has written on a wide variety of subjects, and twice been nominated for a British Press Award. He has been the editor of the paper’s PHS column, as well as writing his own regular feature, Alan Franks’s Diary. This became a book, published by J.M. Dent, and then a radio series for Woman’s Hour, which he read himself.
His work has taken him all over the world, climbing a 23,000-feet peak in the Andes, learning how to duet with Tony Bennet at the Frank Sinatra Music School in New York, and dying on stage at The Comedy Store. As an interviewer he has met and written about a large number of top practitioners in public life and the arts, particularly, music, literature and the theatre/cinema. These include, in music: Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Paul Simon, Chuck Berry, Brian Wilson, Andrew Lloyd-Webber, Wynton Marsalis, Ravi Shankar, Philip Glass, Peter Maxwell-Davies; in literature: Anthony Powell, Barbara Cartland, Laurie Lee, James Baldwin, John le Carre; in the theatre/cinema: Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Anthony Hopkins, Ian McKellen, Tom Stoppard, Peter Hall, Alan Ayckbourn and many more. Franks’s poems have been described as “intensely musical” by Jo Shapcott, president of the Poetry Society, his fiction as “brilliantly comic” by the novelist Tom Sharpe, his drama as “profoundly moving” by The Daily Telegraph and his songs as “complex and addictive” by the late singer and songwriter Jake Thackray.
His collection of poetry, published by the journal Markings, and the new CD of his songs, Bird In Flames, both come out this spring and will be featured in a launch concert on June 17th at the Tristan Bates Theatre in London’s West End.
Picture by Sylvan Mason