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Barney Norris FRSL [1] (born 1987) is an English writer. [2]
Norris was born in Chichester in West Sussex, later moving to Wiltshire where he attended Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury. He studied English at Keble College, Oxford, and creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.
After leaving university, he founded the touring Up in Arms Theatre Company [3] with the director Alice Hamilton, and worked in the theatre as assistant to Thelma Holt, Michael Frayn, Peter Gill, and Max Stafford-Clark, before becoming a full-time writer. He is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Oxford, and reviews fiction regularly for The Guardian .
Norris's early plays were produced by his company Up in Arms, usually on tour and often in partnership with other theatres. [4] Following the success of his first full-length play Visitors , [5] he began to write for other companies, and has since worked with Salisbury Playhouse, [6] the Bush Theatre, [7] Oxford Playhouse, the Arcola Theatre, the Royal and Derngate, Out of Joint, the Bridge Theatre and Riverside Studios, among others
His first novel, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain, was published in 2016; he has since published three other novels, including Undercurrent in 2022, and two books of non-fiction.
In February 2024, Norris was announced as the Green Party of England and Wales candidate for the Salisbury constituency at the 2024 general election. [8]
He has also acted as an ambassador for south-west based homelessness charity Alabare, as a member of the Society of Authors Sustainability Committee and chair of the Scriptwriters Committee, and as a member of the Writers Guild of Great Britain Theatre Negotiating Team.