Renowned screenwriter Frederic Raphael is to give a free public reading at the University of Glasgow at 5.30pm on Tuesday 10 February in Lecture Theatre room T415, 4th Floor Adam Smith Building (access via Great George Streetor University Gardens ).

Frederic Raphael is the author of 37 books, including 19 novels, several essay and story collections, numerous screenplays, biographies of Byron and Maugham, and three volumes of translations of classical poetry and drama.

His most recent screenplay was for the Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut.  He won an Oscar for his 1965 screenplay for Darling, which starred Julie Christie. Two years later his screenplay for Two for the Road was also nominated for an Oscar.  He also wrote the screenplay for the 1967 film adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd directed by John Schlesinger.

The best-known of his novels is the semi-autobiographical The Glittering Prizes (1976), which traces the lives of a group of Cambridge University undergraduates in post-war Britain as they move through university and into the wider world. The original six-part BBC television series, from which the book was adapted, won him a Royal Television Society Writer of the Year Award.  Fame and Fortune, which continues the story to 1979, was adapted in 2007 and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, television channels having refused to commission the sequel themselves.

In 1999, Raphael published Eyes Wide Open, a memoir of his collaboration with the director Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's final movie.

His articles and book reviews appear in a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times and The Sunday Times.

Born in Chicago, his family emigrated to England in 1938. He divides his time between England and France, with forays into the U.S.

Admission is free to the lecture and all are welcome to attend. A collection towards the Creative Writing Scholarships fund will be held after the event.

Further information:
Martin Shannon, Media Relations Officer
University of Glasgow Tel: 0141 330 8593

 


First published: 27 January 2009