Everything about Melvyn Bragg totally explained
Lord Melvyn Bragg, Baron Bragg,
FRSL,
FRTS (born
6 October 1939) is a
British author and broadcaster.
Early life
Bragg was born in
Wigton,
Cumbria, the son of Mary Ethel (Park), a tailoress, and Stanley Bragg, a stock keeper turned machinist. He attended the
Nelson Thomlinson School in Wigton and then read
Modern History at
Wadham College, Oxford in the late 1950s.
Broadcasting career
He started his career in 1961 as a general trainee at the
BBC and in his role as writer and
broadcaster in 1967, spending his first two years in radio at the
BBC World Service, then at the
BBC Third Programme and
BBC Home Service.. He then successfully applied to join the production team of
Huw Wheldon's
Monitor arts series on
BBC Television. He has been Controller of Arts at LWT since 1990 (including a stint as Head of Arts from 1982 to 1990). He is also known for his many programmes on
BBC Radio 4, including
Start the Week, which he presented for ten years,
In Our Time, and
The Routes of English, a history of the
English language.
Honours
He was appointed to the
House of Lords in 1998 as a
Labour life peer, under the title
Baron Bragg, of Wigton in the County of Cumbria.
In 1999 Bragg was appointed Chancellor of the
University of Leeds. He is also President of the
National Campaign for the Arts (since 1986), President of the mental health charity
Mind, and a Governor of the
London School of Economics (since 1997). He was made Domus Fellow,
St Catherine's College, Oxford, in 1990, he received an Honorary Fellowship from Wadham College, Oxford in 1995 and he holds 13 honorary doctorates. He became a member of the
Arts Council Literature Panel in 1969 and has since become Chairman.
Author
Lord Bragg is a prolific
novelist and writer of
non-fiction, and has written a number of television and film
screenplays. He is president of the
National Academy of Writing.
Family
Bragg married his first wife, Lisa Roche, when he was 21, and they'd one child. He didn't know that she'd a history of suicide attempts; 10 years later, she killed herself . "I could have done things which helped and I did things which harmed," he told the Guardian in 1998. "So yes, I feel guilt, I feel remorse."
Bragg's second wife, Catherine (Cate) Haste, whom he married in 1973 is also a writer, having, among other things, edited the 2007 memoir of
Clarissa Eden, widow of Sir
Anthony Eden, and collaborated with
Cherie Booth, wife of
Tony Blair, in a 2004 book about the wives of British Prime Ministers.
Bibliography
Fiction
Non-fiction
Speak For England (1976)
Land of The Lakes (1983)
Laurence Olivier (1984)
Cumbria in Verse (editor) (1984)
(1988)
King Lear in New York (1994)
On Giants' Shoulders (1998)
(1999)
Two Thousand Years Part 2 (1999)
The Routes of English (2001)
The Adventure of English (2003)
Twelve Books That Changed the World (2006)
Children's books
A Christmas Child (1977)
My Favourite Stories of Lakeland (editor) (1981)
Filmography
As screenwriter:
Isadora (1968) (with Clive Exton and Margaret Drabble). Adapted from Sewell Stokes' book Isadora, an Intimate Portrait and Isadora Duncan's autobiography, My Life. Directed by Karel Reisz, the film starred Vanessa Redgrave and James Fox.
Play Dirty (1968)
The Music Lovers (1970) (also known as Ken Russell's Film on Tchaikovsky and the Music Lovers)
Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)
Other information
Bragg is cited as the first person recorded to use the word "prat" to mean "fool". The earliest reference to this use is from his 1969 novel Without a City Wall.
He is a friend of Tony Blair, the former Labour Prime Minister.
Awards and recognition
Awards
Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for Without a City Wall (1968)
Time/Life Silver Pen Award for The Hired Man (1970)
Bad Sex in Fiction Award for A Time to Dance (1993)
BAFTA TV Award for An Interview with Dennis Potter (1995)
WH Smith Literary Award for The Soldier's Return (2000)
Recognition
On 17 October 2005 Bragg officially opened the "Melvyn Bragg Drama Studio", named in his honour, at Millom School, Millom, Cumbria.Further Information
Get more info on 'Melvyn Bragg'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://melvyn_bragg.totallyexplained.com">Melvyn Bragg Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
