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Ken Whitmore, born Hanley, Staffordshire, December 22, 1937, is a prolific author of radio plays, stage plays, short stories and poetry. His writing is characterised by black comedy and fantastic ideas, such as the complete disappearance of a man’s house, family and dog (One of Our Commuters is Missing) and the need for all mankind to jump in the air simultaneously (Jump! - a work which was produced on radio, stage, TV and as a book.)
Hanley, in Staffordshire, England, is a constituent town of Stoke-on-Trent. Hanley was incorporated as a municipal borough in 1857 and became a county borough with the passage of the Local Government Act 1888. In 1910, along with Burslem, Tunstall, Fenton, Longton and Stoke-upon-Trent it was federated into the county borough of Stoke-on-Trent. Hanley was the only one of the six towns to be a county borough before the merger; its status was transferred to the enlarged borough. In 1925, following the granting of city status, it became one of the six towns that constitute the City of Stoke-on-Trent.
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His first radio play in 1974 was Haywire at Humbleford Flag and there swiftly followed a stream of high-quality radio plays, ending with The Final Twist (from a stage play written in collaboration with Alfred Bradley.)
Whitmore’s adaptations for radio are Going Under from the novel by the Russian Lydia Chukovskaya, a five-part adaptation of Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, and an eight-part adaptation of Fame is the Spur by Howard Spring.
Lydia Korneyevna Chukovskaya was a Soviet writer, poet, editor, publicist, memoirist and dissident. Her deeply personal writings reflect the human cost of Soviet totalitarianism, and she devoted much of her career to defending dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. The daughter of the celebrated children's writer Korney Chukovsky, she was wife of scientist Matvei Bronstein, and a close associate and chronicler of the poet Anna Akhmatova.
Brighton Rock is a novel by Graham Greene, published in 1938 and later adapted for film in 1947 and 2010. The novel is a murder thriller set in 1930s Brighton. The title refers to a confectionery traditionally sold at seaside resorts, which in the novel is used as a metaphor for the personality of Pinkie, which is the same all the way through. There are links between this novel and Greene's earlier novel A Gun for Sale (1936), because Raven's murder of the gang boss Kite, mentioned in A Gun For Sale, allows Pinkie to take over his gang and thus sets the events of Brighton Rock in motion.
Henry Graham Greene, better known by his pen name Graham Greene, was an English novelist regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers. He was shortlisted, in 1966 and 1967, for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Through 67 years of writings, which included over 25 novels, he explored the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world, often through a Catholic perspective.
His published stage plays are Jump for Your Life, Pen Friends, La Bolshie Vita, The Final Twist and The Turn of the Screw, adapted from the story by Henry James.
Henry James, OM was an American-British author regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of renowned philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
Paul Donovan on TimesOnline quoted Whitmore as saying that his dearest wish was to write a drama that would stop people ironing.
