Peter Arnott
Novelist, Playwright
About
Born in Glasgow in 1962, Peter is the writer of many professionally produced stage plays starting with White Rose (Traverse Theatre) and The Boxer Benny Lynch (touring) in 1985. Many of his most successful plays have been historically set. He says he thinks of writing as principally an excuse for reading lots of books. He also writes extensively in Scots.
His dramatic works also include award-winning The Breathing House (The Royal Lyceum, TMA Best New Play 2003) and the music drama Why Do You Stand There in the Rain? (Pepperdine University, Fringe First 2012). This was one of several plays he’s written for a student cast. He has also worked with refugees and in young people’s theatre and has run writing workshops from Easterhouse to Istanbul. He has taught at Glasgow University as well as within a community education setting.
He has been writer-in-residence at the Tron and the Traverse as well as at The National Library of Scotland and with the Genomics Forum and IASH at Edinburgh University.
In 2023, his fiftieth and fifty-first professional productions of new plays, Variant at Oran Mor and the Traverse, and Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape, at Pitlochry Festival Theatre and The Royal Lyceum, will prologue his starting as a Royal Literary Fellow at the University of Dundee.
His novel Moon Country, with a rather more philosophical focus, while hopefully being pretty funny, was published by Vagabond Voices in 2015. He lives in Glasgow.
