Press Release: Prizes and Awards
Best 'Effing' Theatre Biography?
Posted at 10:14PM Sunday 13 Apr 2008
Coral Browne: 'This Effing Lady' (Oberon Books), by Rose Collis, has been shortlisted for the inaugural Sheridan Morley Prize for the Best Theatre Biography 2007.
The presentation is at the Garrick Club on 22 April. The judges are Ruth Leon, Simon Callow and Ion Trewin.
Coral Browne: 'This Effing Lady' was launched at the Royal National Theatre on October 4, with a sell-out Platform Event in the Cottesloe, attended by Timothy West, Prunella Scales, Julian Glover, Isla Blair, Liz Brewer and Frith Banbury.
A selection of review extracts for the book are attached.
Coral Browne's real-life encounter with Guy Burgess in Moscow in 1958 is the subject of Alan Bennett's award-winning play An Englishman Abroad, one half of the double-bill, Single Spies. A critically acclaimed revival of Single Spies, by Theatre Royal Bath Productions, is currently on tour nationally, starring Nigel Havers, Diana Quick and Jack Ryder.
Nigel Havers, who plays Guy Burgess in An Englishman Abroad, says Coral Browne: 'This Effing Lady' is 'a most compelling book'.
Rose Collis has recently become a client of literary agency Pollinger Ltd,
http://www.pollingerltd.com/index.htm, with whom she is working to produce the first biography of Clemence Dane - arguably Britain's most successful, multi-faceted and influential female writer in the 20s and 30s. Novelist, playwright, screenwriter, sculptor and painter, Clemence Dane was the first British woman writer to win an Oscar (in 1947, for Perfect Strangers) and author of the groundbreaking novel, Regiment of Women (1917), which inspired Radclyffe Hall to write The Well of Loneliness (1928). Mentor to Noel Coward, she created the glittering and influential 'Tavistock Set' of writers, actors and designers, including Coward, Ivor Novello, Victor Steibel, Richard Addinsell, Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, David Niven and Gladys Calthrop.
Rose Collis is a contributor to the new non-fiction anthology, The Illustrated Brighton Moment,
http://thebrightonmoment.com/, which is being launched during the Brighton Festival with a sold-out event on May 5 at the Komedia www.brightonfestival.org
Rose Collis is also appearing on July 19 at the CMP literary and music festival in July www.cmpca.org.uk, with a talk on the friendship between the two most prominent media figures of the 1950s, Nancy Spain and Gilbert Harding.
For more information about Coral Browne: 'This Effing Lady', contact James Stephens at Oberon Books, on 020 7607 3654 or email jamesstephens@oberonbooks.com
For more information about Rose Collis, contact 01444 235531.
Booktrade