Michelene Wandor is a playwright, poet, fiction writer and musician. She is the first woman playwright to have had a drama on one of the National Theatre’s main stages – The Wandering Jew, in 1987, the same year her adaptation of The Belle of Amherst won an International Emmy for Thames TV. Her radio plays include Orlando and Friends and Corridors of Light and Shadow (Radio 3) and her dramatisations for Radio 4 include novels by Dostoyevsky, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Kipling, H.G. Wells, Sara Paretsky and Margaret Drabble.
She has written two influential books on gender and contemporary theatre, Carry on, Understudies, and Postwar British Drama: Looking Back in Gender, and she also reviews and broadcasts regularly on Radios 3 and 4. In 2002 she received a Millennium Lottery Fund Award to make a CD of the music of Salamone Rossi, the 17th century Jewish Mantuan composer. Her poetry, Gardens of Eden Revisited, and her collection of short stories, False Relations, are published by Five Leaves.
Her book The Author is not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Conceived (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) is the first history of creative writing in the UK, and a theorisation of its pedagogy. The Art of Writing Drama (Methuen, 2008) is based on her extensive experience of writing drama for all media. Tulips in Winter, a play about Spinoza, was broadcast on Radio 3 (2008), and she is writing another for the network, about Isabella d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia. She has completed her first novel, Music and the Devil.
