Glyn Maxwell
Glyn Maxwell (born 1962) is a British poet, playwright, novelist, librettist, and lecturer.
1928) acted in the original stage show of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood in the West End and on Broadway in 1956 — Maxwell was born and raised in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire.
In 1987 he moved to America to study poetry and drama with Derek Walcott at Boston University.
After his marriage and the birth of his daughter Alfie in 1997, he moved with his family to the USA, living and teaching at first in Amherst, Massachusetts, and then in New York City.
All his other collections of poems - The Breakage, Hide Now and Pluto - have been shortlisted for either the T.S.Eliot, Forward, or Costa (formerly Whitbread) Prizes.
In 2018, the rights to Maxwell's epic poem Time's Fool (1999) were optioned by the film director Paul King and the screenwriter Jon Croker, and subsequently bought by Fox Searchlight for development as a feature film, with King and Croker as writers, and David Heyman as producer.
[1] Maxwell co-wrote the screenplay for The Beast In The Jungle, a dance-film based on the Henry James novella, with the film's director Clara Van Gool.
[5] A stand-alone sequel, titled Drinks With Dead Poets: The Autumn Term and set in a mysterious village, was published by Oberon in October 2016.
[6] In this 'brilliantly unclassifiable' work, several deceased poets appear as characters, their speech taken verbatim from their writings.
His first novel, Blue Burneau (1994), was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Prize and the book Moon Country, published in 1996, describes a visit to Iceland with Simon Armitage.
Alex Clifton), a retelling of Euripides' Women of Troy and Hecabe (Oxford Playhouse/Shaw Theatre London), Lily Jones's Birthday a satyr-play based on Aristophanes' Lysistrata, which premiered at RADA in 2009; Liberty, about the French Revolution, which premiered at Shakespeare's Globe in the 2008 season (dir.
[9] Wind in the Willows and The Secret Seven were both nominated as 'Best Play For Young People' at the British Theatre Awards.
[11] His play Mimi and The Stalker was one of six projects awarded funding by the UK Film Council in the spring 2009 quarter, for development as a screenplay under the name Witchgrass.
Other plays include Wolfpit, about two green children said to have appeared in Suffolk in the 12th century (Edinburgh 1996; New York 2006), The Forever Waltz, a reworking of the Orpheus-Eurydice story (New York 2005; Edinburgh 2005), and The Only Girl in the World, a play about Mary Kelly, the last victim of Jack the Ripper (Hoxton Hall, 2001, Arcola, 2008).
He is the Resident Playwright for New York's Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, who have staged Broken Journey, Wolfpit, The Lifeblood and Agamemnon Home in New York, and will present The Gambler (after Dostoevsky's novella) in January 2016 at the Wild Project in the East Village.
His verse monologue, The Best Man, was turned into a feature film starring Danny Swanson (dir.
His other libretti include The Girl of Sand, also composed by Elena Langer and performed at the Almeida Opera Festival in 2004, and The Birds (after Aristophanes), composed by Edward Dudley Hughes and performed by I Fagiolini at the City of London Festival in 2005.
In 2016, Maxwell collaborated with David Bruce again, on Nothing, an opera adapted from the book by Janne Teller.
Maxwell has taught at Amherst College, Princeton, Columbia, NYU and The New School in the USA, and at The Universities of Warwick and Essex in the UK.
