Keith Dewhurst

Keith Dewhurst was born in 1931. He worked in a cotton mill and as a travelling reporter with Manchester United before becoming a playwright. Three of his seventeen stage plays were premiered at the Royal Court Theatre and six, including his adaptation of Flora Thompson’s ‘Lark Rise’, at the Royal National Theatre. Several of these plays featured the folk rock bands Steeleye Span and The Albion Band. He wrote two movies, the novel ‘Captain of the Sands’, eighteen TV plays, of which ‘Last Bus’ won the Japan Prize, and episodes for many series, including the original ‘Z-Cars’. He was a Guardian columnist, a member of the Production Board of the British Film Institute, Writer in Residence at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, a presenter of TV arts programmes and a Granada comedy show. He has written two football books and co-wrote (with Jack Shepherd) a theatrical memoir about his time with Bill Bryden’s famous Cottesloe Theatre company. In Australia he was involved in an environmental protest by the Palm Beach Action Group. In more recent years he has written a flurry of prose: two collections of novellas and two novels, one short, one long. Now in his nineties he is still writing and is a regular contributor to Manchester United Football Club’s fanzine, United We Stand. His second wife is the theatrical agent Alexandra Cann.