Nicholas Shakespeare has made several extended biographies for television: on Evelyn Waugh, Mario Vargas Llosa,[7] Bruce Chatwin,[8] Martha Gellhorn, and Dirk Bogarde.

[9] The Dancer Upstairs was made into a feature film of the same name in 2002,[10] for which Shakespeare wrote the screenplay and which John Malkovich directed.

Shakespeare's novels, which have been translated into 22 languages, place ordinary people against a background of significant events, as with The Dancer Upstairs, which deals with Abimael Guzmán, leader of Peru's Shining Path; and Snowleg, set partly during the Cold War in East Germany.

The central novella, "Oddfellows", was based on the Battle of Broken Hill, a little-known jihadi attack in the Australian outback 100 years ago.

On 1 January 1915, two Afghan camel drivers answered the Turkish sultan's call for a holy war against the British Empire, and attacked a picnic train of 1200 men women and children in the iron-ore town of Broken Hill, killing four.

The Sunday Telegraph described them as "honed miniatures" and the Australian critic Peter Craven in the Sydney Morning Herald wrote: "I do not expect to read a more formidable piece of short fiction this year."

[13] The Wall Street Journal's Anna Mundow called the book "arresting", The Economist called it "definitive",[14] The Australian "a masterpiece... His book is better than almost any non-fiction ever gets, a work of literature in its own right",[15] while Washington Post columnist Michael Dirda also praised Shakespeare's work as 'a dazzling, even dizzying achievement'.

[25] He also contributed a story, "The Return of the Native", to OxTravels, a travel anthology that was produced to raise money for Oxfam's work.