Stephen Mollett is a dramatist and fiction writer. He has written eight plays for BBC Radio 4 in a variety of genres, including A House Halfway to Africa (a biographical drama concerning Van Gogh) and the surreal romantic comedy set in St Ives, The Visitors’ Book. Three other radio plays, Running West, The Joke and A White Velvet Nightcap in Florida, are all set in Budapest, where Stephen lived for a year. While there he wrote and directed a 20-minute quirkily comic film, The Paprika File (1996), which was part-financed by the British Council and the Hungarian Ministry of Culture.
For television, Stephen has written five episodes of the BBC1 drama series Doctors, including ‘Sentence’ (2012). Stephen’s screenplay about evacuees, In Care of Strangers, won a national screenwriting award. His stage play for young people, commissioned by John Retallack’s Oxford Stage Company, was given staged readings on a national tour in 1997. In 2020 two mini radio dramas were produced by INK Festival and broadcast locally.
Stephen was co-centre director for the Arvon Foundation at Totleigh Barton from 1988 to 1990, and then tutored on several Arvon courses himself. He has created and taught a variety of creative-writing courses at Bath Spa University (1991–1995) and at the University of Chichester 2000-2019). He has two children and lives in West Sussex with his wife, the writer and poet Stephanie Norgate.
