| 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 film Brick Lane. Her feature film The Iron Lady is due for release in late 2011, and Shame is to be released in early 2012.
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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.[1] Her sister is also an actress, and her partner is actor Jacob Krichefski.[2]
After initial ambitions to become an actress herself, she decided to become a writer while reading drama and literature at Exeter University.[3] She then took a postgraduate writing course at the Central School of Speech and Drama.[2]
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 this with a television play My Fragile Heart (2000) and a BBC 2 drama Murder in 2002, starring Julie Walters.[4][2]
She continued her work in theatre, writing plays for the Royal Exchange Studio Theatre Manchester, the Royal Lyceum Theatre and the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh.[5] Her 2001 play Tender for the Hampstead Theatre gained her a nomination as "most promising playwright" at the 2002 Laurence Olivier Theatre Awards.[4] 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 is The Hour (2011), set in a BBC newsroom during the 1956 Suez Crisis, which has already been commissioned for a second series.[3]
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.[2] Her next film is The Iron Lady, which stars Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher. She has also written a screen adaptation of Sebastian Faulks's novel Birdsong, and a smaller-budget production called Shame, co-written with Steve McQueen.[3][4]