Abi Morgan

Abi Morgan
Born	1968
Occupation	Screenwriter
Nationality	British
Period	1998–present
Genres	Drama
Notable work(s)	Sex Traffic, Brick Lane, The Hour, The Iron Lady, Shame

Abi Morgan (born 1968) is a British playwright and screenwriter known for her works for television, such as Sex Traffic and The Hour, and the films Brick Lane, The Iron Lady, and Shame.

Early life

Morgan is the daughter of actress Pat England and theatre director Gareth Morgan, who was director of the Gulbenkian Theatre in Newcastle upon Tyne (now the Northern Stage). Her parents divorced when she was a teenager and her childhood was spent moving around the country while her mother acted in repertory theatre; she told The Scotsman in 2010 that she had attended seven separate schools during her childhood. Her sister is also an actress, and her partner is actor Jacob Krichefski.

After initial ambitions to become an actress herself, she decided to become a writer while reading drama and literature at Exeter University. She then took a postgraduate writing course at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

Writing career

Having not dared to show any of her writing "to anyone for five years", her first professional stage credit was in 1998 with Skinned at the Nuffield Theatre, Southampton, and the same year she gained her first television writing credit on the continuing ITV drama series Peak Practice, following that with a television play My Fragile Heart (2000) and a BBC 2 drama Murder in 2002, starring Julie Walters.

She continued her work in theatre, writing plays for the Royal Exchange Studio Theatre Manchester, the Royal Lyceum Theatre and the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh. Her 2001 play Tender for the Hampstead Theatre gained her a nomination as "most promising playwright" at the 2002 Laurence Olivier Theatre Awards. She was commissioned to write the single drama Sex Traffic for Channel 4 in 2004, about a teenage girl trafficked from the Balkans to Britain. This drama, directed by David Yates won the 2005 BAFTA award for Best Drama Serial. She has since written a number of single dramas for television including Tsunami: The Aftermath (2006), White Girl, part of White (2008) and Royal Wedding (2010), which follows the 1981 Royal Wedding through the perspective of events held in a small Welsh mining village.

Her first continuing drama series was The Hour (2011), set in a BBC newsroom during the 1956 Suez Crisis. It was commissioned for a second series. In 2012, she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie, or Dramatic Special. She also wrote Birdsong, a two-part television adaptation of Sebastian Faulks's novel of the same title.

She has also written for cinema; her 2007 adaptation of Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane was critically acclaimed, but created controversy – some Brick Lane Bengalis labelled the film "defamatory" and a planned royal film performance was cancelled. Her next film was The Iron Lady, which starred Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, closely followed by a smaller-budget production, Shame, co-written with Steve McQueen.

Selected works

Plays

• Skinned (1998)
• Sleeping Around (1998) - co-written with Mark Ravenhill, Stephen Greenhorn and Hilary Fannin
• Fast Food (1999)
• Splendour (2000)
• Tiny Dynamite (2001)
• Tender (2001)
• Monster Mum (2005)
• Fugee (2008)
• Chain Play - Production II - co-written with Neil LaBute, Mike Poulton and Tanya Ronder
• The Night is Darkest Before the Dawn (2009), as part of The Great Game: Afghanistan
• Lovesong (2011)
• 27 (2011)

Film screenplays

• Brick Lane (2007)
• The Iron Lady (2011)
• Shame (2011)

TV screenplays

• My Fragile Heart (2000)
• Murder (2002)
• Sex Traffic (2004)
• Tsunami: The Aftermath (2006)
• White Girl, part of White (2008) - with Hettie Macdonald, won the TV Spielfilm Award at the Cologne Conference
• Royal Wedding (2010)
• The Hour (2011)
• Birdsong (2012)

External links

• Abi Morgan at the Internet Movie Database
• Theatre credits
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/apr/09/abi-morgan-taliban-play