User:Anton Gill

ANTON GILL (autobiographical note)

Born in London; only child of an English mother and a German father. Both parents died in 1995. My mother taught English, Russian and Drama and my father was an engineer. Early infancy spent in Bamberg, Germany. I speak good French and German, and sketchy Italian and Spanish. Educated at Chigwell School, Essex, 1960-1966, where I did a lot of acting and decided that I would go into the theatre. Clare College, Cambridge, 1967-1970, where I did more acting, and directing, ending up as President of the CU ADC (Amateur Dramatic Club) and several other drama clubs, as well as running the college Fine Art Society. Left with a 2:1 in English Literature with French and German subsidiary subjects. BA Hons. 1970; MA Hons. (Cantab.) 1973. I was taught to punt by Salman Rushdie, who was a great friend, and also worked in Cambridge theatre with David Hare. From 1970 - 1976 I worked in the theatre, principally as an Assistant Director at the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre, London, where I worked with, among others, Lindsay Anderson, Samuel Beckett, Ronald Eyre, Athol Fugard, Albert Finney, Billie Whitelaw, John Osborne and Anthony Page. I also wrote plays, one of which was performed at the Theatre Upstairs in 1973. I ran an Experimental Theatre in Geneva for a season in 1973 and did a ‘collective creation’ play about François Villon there, which I later re-wrote as a formal play. This was directed at the Cologne City Theatre by Hansgünther Heyme in 1975. I also worked with John Osborne on a season of his plays at Greenwich, 1974/1975, and on the premiere of Samuel Beckett’s NOT I at the Royal Court, 1973. My one-woman play WAITING was put on by LA MAMA in New York in 1976. From 1976-1978 I was a Drama Officer at the Arts Council of Great Britain with special responsibility for new plays and trainee directors. I started to write for radio, and contributed a number of arts features and plays, including THE MAN WHO WROTE SHAKESPEARE, a comedy starring Roy Kinnear, and DANDOLO, a play about the Fourth Crusade. THE BERLIN RESURRECTION was a black comedy set in the Berlin Natural History Museum in the last days of the Second World War. In 1976 I worked as a script editor for BBC Radio Drama and from 1978-1980 I was a Senior Drama Producer with the BBC with special responsibility for the Radio 2 soap opera, WAGGONERS’ WALK. During 1981 I ran THE ARCHERS in Birmingham before resigning from the BBC in January 1982. In 1981 and 1982 I directed radio plays for Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Hamburg; one of them was THE MAN WHO WROTE SHAKESPEARE, which was also produced by Norwegian Radio, and elsewhere in Germany, and in New Zealand and Canada. In May 1982 I met Nicola Browne in Egypt and we married that November. The marriage ended in 1998. No children. After a brief period of freelancing, mainly writing and directing radio plays and adaptations and TV scripts (ANGELS, CROSSROADS, EMMERDALE), I joined the TV-am breakfast television company in November 1982 and spent 18 months with them as a features producer, where among many other things I set up and produced their soap-opera, THE WORLD OF MELANIE PARKER. I resigned in May 1984 to become a full-time writer. The decision to do so was part accident and part design. Most of my work has been in the field of contemporary European history, but I have also written a series of thrillers set in Ancient Egypt, whose history has always interested me. What I enjoy most in my contemporary history work is tracking down and interviewing people who lived through and participated in the experiences I am writing about; their conversations have formed the hub of much of my work. When I’m not writing my main occupation has, until recently, been travelling as much and as far as I can. In the 1980s, I travelled widely in India, Nepal, Thailand and Burma. Before that I spent some time travelling in Iran and Afghanistan. In 1992 I was in Australia, and in 1993 I visited Mustang, an ethnic Tibetan ‘kingdom’ (it actually has a king, but is effectively under Nepali rule) in Northern Nepal which had only been open to tourists since 1991, about which I wrote for OUTDOORS ILLUSTRATED. The following year I was a member of the first expedition to Nar-Phu, also in Northern Nepal, but unvisited by Europeans (and then only once) for 40 years, on which I also wrote for OUTDOORS. One feature of that trip was attending a sky burial (the body is stripped and chopped up for the vultures). During the later 1990s I travelled in Ecuador, Tanzania and Cuba; in 2001 I spent some time on the Upper Amazon in Peru. Between 1998 and 2005, I travelled extensively in France and Spain. For my work, I’ve been everywhere in Europe except Finland, and I’ve also travelled in the USA (especially when researching two of my books, THE JOURNEY BACK FROM HELL and PEGGY GUGGENHEIM - ART LOVER. (Please see my booklist for details of these and other titles). In 2007, I visited Ethiopia and spent some time in Venice. In recent years I have spent more and more time in France, a country I have been fond of since my first visit to Paris forty years ago. I’ve written for SKI MAGAZINE about the Zen of skiing, on women’s life in dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu’s Romania for WOMAN, and about croquet for COUNTRY LIVING, and I have contributed features (on subjects ranging from seventeenth-century explorers to the anti-Nazi resistance) to the TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT. I’m interested in whale conservation and have been since long before it became fashionable - I have worked for Friends of the Earth as a volunteer, and I wrote a sixty-minute feature about whales and whaling for Radio 4 in 1978. The other things I like doing are cooking, looking at paintings (from Giotto to Jackson Pollock and beyond), and playing the clarinet (badly). I paint a bit and draw cartoons, but only for my own amusement. I live in London and Paris, and since February 2005, have spent most of my time in Paris. My wife (since January 2005) is the actress, Marji Campi. The sons of her first marriage both live in Barcelona with their families, and we are frequent visitors there, as well as to London and Venice.

London/Paris, 2010

ANTON GILL: selected books published since 1984. (This list covers main books only. It does not include plays and features.)

MARTIN ALLEN IS MISSING (study of missing children in London) - Corgi Books, London, 1984

HOW TO BE OXBRIDGE (satirical history of Oxford and Cambridge universities since World War Two) - Grafton Books, London, 1985; Kenkyusha, Tokyo, 1988

CROQUET, THE COMPLETE GUIDE (social history of the game of croquet on both sides of the Atlantic) - Heinemann, London, 1986

MAD ABOUT THE BOY (biography of pop-singer Boy George) - Century, London, 1987

THE JOURNEY BACK FROM HELL (study of post-war lives of survivors of the German concentration camps of World War Two - winner of the H. H. Wingate Prize for non-fiction, 1988) - Grafton, London, 1988 and 1989; Morrow, NYC, 1989; Avon, NYC, 1990; HarperCollins UK, London, 1994; reprinted 1996 and 1998

BERLIN TO BUCHAREST (travels in Eastern Europe just before the counter-revolutions there - ie in 1988 and 1989) - Grafton, London, 1990; David and Charles, NYC, 1992; Hollandia, Amsterdam, 1993

CITY OF THE HORIZON CITY OF DREAMS (German VOGUE top five novels, 1997) CITY OF THE DEAD (top ten bestsellers, fiction, France, 1997) (three thrillers set in ancient Egypt about the time of the reign of Tutankhamun) - Bloomsbury, London, 1991-1993; 1994; Eichborn, Frankfurt, 1992-1995; Droemer Knaur, Munich, 1994-1996; de Boekerij, Amsterdam, 1994-1996; 1998; Editions 10/18 - Les grands detectives - Paris, 1994-1996; Plaza y Janes Editores, Barcelona, 1995-1997 and Planeta DeAgostini, Madrid, 1997-2002; Mondadori, Milan, 1995-1997; Alpress, Frydek-Mistek (Czech Republic), 1996-1998; Alien, Athens, 1997-2000 (and continuing as of 2003); repr. USA (Felony & Mayhem) 2006-2008)

A DANCE BETWEEN FLAMES (a general history of Berlin between the two world wars) - John Murray, London, 1993; Carroll and Graf, NYC, 1994; Abacus, London, 1995

AN HONOURABLE DEFEAT (a history of the German Resistance to Hitler and Nazism, 1933-1945) - Heinemann Mandarin, London, 1994; Henry Holt, NYC, 1994; UK & US pbk 1995

RULING PASSIONS (sexuality and the British Empire) - BBC Books, London, 1995

THE HANGING GALE (novel based on drama serial about the C19 Irish famine) - BBC Books, London, 1995

CITY OF LIES CITY OF DESIRE CITY OF THE SEA (three further Egyptian thrillers, published between 1997 and 2003 by the mainland European publishers listed above.)

THE DEVIL’S MARINER (a biography of the seventeenth-century explorer and pirate William Dampier) - Michael Joseph, London, 1997

THE LAST TALONS OF THE EAGLE (with Gary Hyland; about avant-garde German military aeroplane development in the Second World War) - Headline, London, 1998

EXTINCT (with Alex West; natural history book to tie in with C4 TV series of same name) - C4 Books, 2002

PEGGY GUGGENHEIM - THE LIFE OF AN ART ADDICT - HarperCollins UK 2001/USA 2002 (as ART LOVER)/ Random House - Mondadori, Barcelona, Spain 2002/Globus Brazil 2004/Poland/S. Korea/Italy/Greece - 2004 +. Paperback editions 2004 + /Hungary 2006; repr. UK 2007

THE GREAT ESCAPE (account of the escape of RAF POWs from Stalag-Luft III in 1944) - Headline, 2002; Poland, 2004; paperback 2004

IL GIGANTE (Florence, Michelangelo and the David, 1492 - 1504) - Headline, 2002; St Martin’s Press, USA, 2004; also Japan, Korea, Italy, 2004 - 2005

ANCIENT EGYPTIANS (history of the land & people, accompanies C4 series) HarperCollins, 2003; paperback UK 2004

WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? - TRACING YOUR FAMILY BACK TO THE TUDORS (accompanies BBC series) HarperCollins, 2006

EMPIRE’S CHILDREN (history of the fall of the British Empire, accompanies Channel 4 series) HarperCollins, 2007

GATEWAY OF THE GODS (a history of Ancient Mesopotamia) Quercus - UK publ. Nov 2008

work in progress: THE SLEEP OF REASON (a novel) VAMPIRES OF ROME (a novel)

London, 2010