Poppy Shakespeare

Last updated
Poppy Shakespeare
Poppy Shakespeare.jpg
AuthorClare Allan
Country United Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Published3 April 2006
PublisherBloomsbury
ISBN 978-0-7475-8046-1

Poppy Shakespeare is a 2006 British novel and channel 4 2004 film about mental illness by Clare Allan. It tells the story of day patients at a mental health hospital. The central characters are Poppy Shakespeare, a new patient, and "N", a long-term patient. Poppy arrives at the hospital strongly asserting that she is sane and demanding to be released from the programme. To gain legal aid she must first prove she is sick so that she can get "MAD money", a.k.a. state benefits. She is befriended by N, who helps her work the system.

Contents

History

Author Clare Allan spent 10 years in a mental health institution.

The book was adapted by Sarah Williams [1] and Cowboy Films to a 90-minute drama directed by Benjamin Ross and shown on Channel 4 on 31 March 2008 and starred Anna Maxwell Martin as N and Naomie Harris as Poppy. [2] The book was short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award 2006, [3] the Orange Award for New Writers 2007 [4] and the BT Mind Book of the year 2007 [5] and long-listed for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007. [6]

According to Michel Faber's review in The Guardian : "Poppy Shakespeare is a distinctive and powerful debut, full of brave experiments that generate unexpectedly fierce emotional heat. In a literary scene whose established stars milk tragedies such as the Holocaust or 9/11 for precious little reason beyond their own artistic vanity, Allan has given us something indigestibly, potently true." [7]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">P. D. James</span> English crime writer

Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park,, known professionally as P. D. James, was an English novelist and life peer. Her rise to fame came with her series of detective novels featuring the police commander and poet, Adam Dalgliesh.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher Priest (novelist)</span> British author (1943–2024)

Christopher Mackenzie Priest was a British novelist and science fiction writer. His works include Fugue for a Darkening Island, The Inverted World, The Affirmation, The Glamour, The Prestige, and The Separation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Broadmoor Hospital</span> High security hospital in Berkshire, England

Broadmoor Hospital is a high-security psychiatric hospital in Crowthorne, Berkshire, England. It is the oldest of England's three high-security psychiatric hospitals, the other two being Ashworth Hospital near Liverpool and Rampton Secure Hospital in Nottinghamshire. The hospital's catchment area consists of four National Health Service regions: London, Eastern, South East and South West. It is managed by the West London NHS Trust.

MindFreedom International is an international coalition of over one hundred grassroots groups and thousands of individual members from fourteen nations. Based in the United States, it was founded in 1990 to advocate against forced medication, medical restraints, and involuntary electroconvulsive therapy. Its stated mission is to protect the rights of people who have been labeled with psychiatric disorders. Membership is open to anyone who supports human rights, including mental health professionals, advocates, activists, and family members. MindFreedom has been recognized by the United Nations Economic and Social Council as a human rights NGO with Consultative Roster Status.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jonathan Bate</span> British author, scholar and critic

Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, FRSL, is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, scholar, and occasional novelist, playwright and poet. He specializes in Shakespeare, Romanticism and ecocriticism. He is Regents Professor of Literature and Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities in a joint appointment of the College of Liberal Arts, the School of Sustainability and the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College in the University of Oxford, where he holds the title of Professor of English Literature. Bate was Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, from 2011 to 2019. From 2017 to 2019 he was Gresham Professor of Rhetoric in the City of London. He was knighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and higher education. He is also Chair of the Hawthornden Foundation.

Robert Macfarlane is a British writer and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mind (charity)</span> British mental health charity

Mind is a mental health charity in England and Wales. Founded in 1946 as the National Association for Mental Health (NAMH), it celebrated its 70th anniversary in 2016.

Jamila Gavin is a British writer who is known mainly for children's books, including several with Indian contexts.

Marc James Wootton is an English actor, comedian and writer, best known for his role as Mr Poppy in the Nativity! film series. He also starred in the TV series High Spirits with Shirley Ghostman, La La Land, Nighty Night and voiced Max in Counterfeit Cat.

<i>The Crimson Petal and the White</i> Book by Michel Faber

The Crimson Petal and the White is a 2002 novel by Michel Faber set in Victorian England.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mad pride</span> Movement encouraging pride in people with mental illnesses

Mad Pride is a mass movement of current and former users of mental health services, as well as those who have never used mental health services but are aligned with the Mad Pride framework. The movement advocates that individuals with mental illness should be proud of their 'mad' identity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Judi Chamberlin</span>

Judi Chamberlin was an American activist, leader, organizer, public speaker and educator in the psychiatric survivors movement. Her political activism followed her involuntary confinement in a psychiatric facility in the 1960s. She was the author of On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System, which is a foundational text in the Mad Pride movement.

Benjamin Ross is a writer and film director, born in 1964, based in the United Kingdom. His most noted works are The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, based on a real-life poisoning case, Poppy Shakespeare, and The Frankenstein Chronicles, about a search for a murderer, said to stitch together dead bodies of young children, trying to re-animate them.

Hayley Long is an English author best known for her teen fiction. She is a recipient of the Tir na n-Og Award.

Rufus May is a British clinical psychologist best known for using his own experiences of being a psychiatric patient to promote alternative recovery approaches for those experiencing psychotic symptoms. After formally qualifying as a clinical psychologist, he then disclosed that he had been previously detained in hospital with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

<i>My Mad Fat Diary</i> British television series

My Mad Fat Diary is a British teen comedy-drama television series that debuted on E4 on 14 January 2013. It is based on the novel My Fat, Mad Teenage Diary by Rae Earl.

Sarah Williams is a British producer and screenwriter perhaps best known for writing the scripts to the 2005 television film Wallis & Edward and co-writing the 2007 feature film Becoming Jane. For her work adapting the novels Poppy Shakespeare and Small Island for television, Williams received two Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award nominations.

Nathan Filer is a British writer best known for his debut novel, The Shock of the Fall. This won several major literary awards, including the Costa Book of the Year and the Betty Trask Prize. It was a Sunday Times Bestseller, and has been translated into thirty languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diana Evans</span> British novelist, journalist and critic (born 1972)

Diana Omo Evans FRSL is a British novelist, journalist and critic who was born and lives in London. Evans has written four full-length novels. Her first novel, 26a, published in 2005, won the Orange Award for New Writers, the Betty Trask Award and the deciBel Writer of the Year award. Her third novel Ordinary People was shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction and won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature. A House for Alice was published in 2023.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">St Andrew's Hospital</span> Hospital in Northamptonshire, England

St Andrews Hospital is a mental health facility in Northampton, England. It is managed by St Andrew's Healthcare.

References

  1. Ross, Benjamin (March 31, 2008). "The beauty of Poppy Shakespeare". The Guardian . Retrieved August 6, 2012.
  2. "Poppy Shakespeare". Channel 4. Retrieved 30 September 2015.
  3. "First Book Award 2006 - Special Reports - guardian.co.uk Books". theguardian.com. Retrieved 30 September 2015.
  4. "BAILEYS Women's Prize for Fiction » Orange Award for New Writers". womensprizeforfiction.co.uk. Retrieved 30 September 2015.
  5. "Mind, the mental health charity - help for mental health problems". mind.org.uk. Retrieved 30 September 2015.
  6. Orangeprize.kentlyons.com
  7. Faber, Michel (April 1, 2006). "It's a MAD world". The Guardian.