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Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett has been one of our leading dramatists since the success of Beyond the Fringe in Britain in the 1960s. His television series Talking Heads has become a modern-day classic, as have many of his works for the stage.

He was born in Leeds, Yorkshire in the UK in 1934 and was himself a 'History Boy' studying at Exeter College, Oxford where he later became a lecturer.

He co-wrote and starred in Beyond the Fringe a satirical review, along with Dudley Moore, Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller, at the Edinburgh Festival in 1960. Later the show travelled to the West End and to New York.

After this, he started writing for the stage, and later, plays for television. To date he has been actor, director, broadcaster, and written for stage, television, radio and film. His work focuses on the everyday and the mundane; on people with typically British characteristics and obsessions.

His first stage play was Forty Years On in 1969. Other well-known stage plays include Kafka's Dick, The Wind In The Willows and The Madness of George III.

His two series of monologues for television, Talking Heads, proved Bennett to be the master of television monologue, a genre he had first anticipated in A Woman Of No Importance - his first play starring a single actress.

Alan Bennett has also written for radio, including The Lady In The Van an autobiographical memoir of a deranged woman who parked her car in his garden and stayed for 15 years; and films, including A Private Function, Parson's Pleasure, Prick Up Your Ears and The Madness of King George for which he was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay adaptation.

Alan Bennett has won many prestigious awards for his writing. The History Boys won the 2004 Evening Standard Award for Best Play of the Year.

The Uncommon Reader is his latest novella in which the Queen develops a taste for reading.

Talking Heads