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Marianne Colbran

Non-fiction writer, Radio/tv/screenwriter

About

Marianne Colbran is a nonfiction writer and screenwriter/playwright. Having started her career writing for a police show, she is fascinated by the stories we tell through news and drama about crime and punishment, especially how police shows never tell the ‘truth’ about policing and about the harms crime reporting can do to marginalised communities. She has published two books on these issues: Shaping the Television Drama: Media Representations of Police and Crime (Palgrave, 2014) and Crime and Investigative Reporting in the UK (Policy Press 2022). 

Marianne began writing in her teens for Jackie magazine. Her first play, The Future of Cool, was staged at the National Theatre Studio in 1985. She trained as an actress and performed and wrote a one-woman show staged at the King’s Head Theatre and Edinburgh Festival in 1990. A career in television followed, working as a staff writer for police show, The Bill, and for the soap opera, Brookside, where one of her episodes was nominated for a BAFTA. She also has a parallel career as an academic and has a M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Criminology from the LSE. She currently has tenure as an Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh Law School. 

She lives in London with her husband and their collection of 40,000 CDs. Her next projects are a nonfiction book on crime and the media, written in conversation with crime writers and journalists, and a one-person play about sex, death and music.