ABOUT ME
I grew up in Cambridge, a city so densely populated with ghosts that the living are outnumbered. Newton brooded in one college, Milton composed in another, and across the way the Cambridge Footlights were busy, over the course of the twentieth century, inventing most of British comedy. It was, in short, a difficult place to grow up without a mild case of imposter syndrome, which is probably why I developed one early and have carried it around like a favourite jumper ever since.
I was, from a young age, a teller of stories, the sort of child who would invent elaborate backstories for pebbles, ready, willing and eager, to defend them in any courtroom. This condition proved incurable, and led me to my first stage at the Cambridge Footlights in 2002. Here I wrote and performed comedy, an apprenticeship that teaches you things no classroom can: that the audience is always right, that the silence is the loudest sound in the world, and that every word must earn its place.
From here I gently began to whisper, in empty rooms, that I was now a writer. I backed this up with a BA in Communication and Film at Anglia Ruskin, then 6-months on the Royal Court Theatre’s Young Writers Programme under Simon Stephens. After that, I was awarded a David Lean Foundation Scholarship, which I still suspect was awarded by clerical error, and achieved an MA in Screenwriting at the National Film & Television School. At the NFTS I studied under the likes of Simon Beaufoy and Stephen Frears; two years of making things, breaking them, and making them again. All at a professional film studio, watched over by elite mentors, wondering daily when someone would notice I didn’t belong.
Then I did what every sensible screenwriter does at the peak of their early career: I left. I moved to a remote island in Thailand to work for a TV network where shoes were strongly discouraged and beach lunch breaks were mandatory. I then spent three years in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as a travel writer. My responsibilities included eating things, getting lost in places, and filing 1,500 words about it by Friday. Then, after forging a working relationship with two skilled and ambitious developers, I went back to the UK in 2017. Here I co-founded a tech company and spent nine years learning that every product is a story, and that running a business is like writing a screenplay, except the characters can quit and sue you.
In 2023 I returned to fiction, which had waited for me without comment, as fiction tends to. I’m now developing a football-based comedy series pilot for a London based production company; a feature adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s Twilight Story, with a producer navigating BFI funding; a stageplay, World of Wrestling, recently stage-read at the Royal Court, Liverpool; and a children’s series pilot called The Macaws about a hopeless under-11s girls’ football team, which is categorically in no way autobiographical.
I also married an American and moved to Austin, Texas, because apparently I hadn’t relocated to enough unforgiveably hot climates. I’m now obsessively learning AI filmmaking. The tools are astonishing; and it’s an industry desperately seeking dramatic narrative talent to hold hands with. This, I suspect, is where I come in.
Come say hello. Bring coffee.
