Hugh Stoddart

Fellow at University of Sussex, 2003-05 Fellow at Kingston University, 2007/08 Fellow at City & Guilds of London School of Art, 2011/12

Hugh Stoddart worked in the visual arts in the 1970s, finally as director of the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. He became a full-time writer with the success of his screenplays at the start of the 1980s - notably one based on Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse and his original screenplay, Remembrance.

Other films from the 1980s include We Think The World Of You starring Alan Bates and Gary Oldman which received a cinema release here and in the U.S.A  in 1988. His play Gibraltar Strait about the shooting of three members of the IRA was staged in London and Belfast in 1990.  In 1992 his original drama serial concerning religious faith and conflict, The Big Battalions, with Brian Cox and Jane Lapotaire, was on Channel Four. His adaptation of The Mill On The Floss was on BBC1 in 1997 starring Emily Watson and in 2002 BBC1 showed his Dialogues Of The Dead, a Dalziel and Pascoe special. In 2010 he wrote and co-directed a short film, Lifetime, and he is now developing this as a feature film.

He remained in touch with the visual arts as a critic and writer of catalogue essays until recently. He worked as a writer in Brixton Prison for two years and was one of the founders of NOT SHUT UP magazine, an outlet for creative writing by people in prison, detention and secure hospitals. Since 2008 he has been the managing editor.

He has held writing fellowships at the Universities of East Anglia and Exeter and currently holds one at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Website:    http://www.hughstoddart.co.uk