Profile

Alan Franks has written for The Times for the past thirty years. This work has taken him all over the world on a wide range of assignments, from climbing the highest mountain in the Andes, dying onstage at The Comedy Store and learning to duet with Tony Bennet at the Frank Sinatra Music School in New York. He has interviewed many top figures in the worlds of music (Paul McCartney, Leonard Cohen, Stephen Sondheim, Yehudi Menuhin, Philip Glass, Ravi Shankar, Andre Previn); theatre/film (Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Woody Allen, Mickey Rourke, Peter Hall, Jonathan Miller) and literature (Muriel Spark, James Baldwin, Elmore Leonard, Ian Rankin, Anthony Powell, Laurie Lee).

A collection of his Alan Franks's Diary columns was published as a book, Real Life With Small Children Under Foot, which he read as a series on Radio 4. He has twice been nominated for a British Press Award.

Alan Franks's previous novel, Boychester's Bugle drew ecstatic reviews. The Times Literary Supplement called it "splendidly funny." For Alan Hollinghurst in The Observer, it resembled Keith Waterhouse, while The Tablet saw similarities with Flann O'Brien and early Kingsley Amis. The veteran farceur Tom Sharpe found it "brilliantly comic."

Going Over, the title story in his darkly hilarious new collection of short novels, was the winner of a national novella competition, and tells of a middle-aged man walking across the wild uplands of northern England for a showdown with his estranged and ancient father. The Tarnished Muse is a riotous satire on the worlds of theatre and the press, while The Night Everything Happened is a journey through the small-hours trauma of a young man on an unbelievable mission.

Franks is the author of many plays, including The Mother Tongue, which starred Prunella Scales and Gwen Taylor. ("English-Chekhov" wrote Sheridan Morley in The Spectator); The Edge of the Land, about the great floods of 1953, and Previous Convictions, a black domestic comedy about family duty and recession.

With the singer Patty Vetta he has released four albums of his songs, including "The Wishfulness Waltz," which was recorded by the band Fairport Convention. They have played regularly at clubs and festivals. The late singer Jake Thackray, with whom they performed, said "I wish I could write and think and play like Alan Franks." His poems have won several prizes, including the Wigtown Competition, Scotland's largest, judged by Don Paterson, and the Petra Kenney (Andrew Motion). Jo Shapcott, president of the Poetry Society, has described his work as "intensely musical." He is currently collaborating as a lyricist with the saxophonist and composer Tim Whitehead, who is artist in residence at Tate Britain.

Going Over

Winner of the New Writer Magazine Novella Competition.

A man sets out to walk across the north of England in search of his estranged 90 year old father. As he goes over the rough moorlands he once trod with the old man, forgotten episodes from his childhood come back - the shocking rows between his parents and the fate that befell his mother. Could he have prevented what happened? Does he have to take responsibility all these years on? Perhaps the answers will appear as the drought lowers the levels of a Cumbrian reservoir to reveal the flooded village beneath. In a story of high emotional tension Franks takes the reader into some of the most magnificent parts of England's hidden landscape and down into the dark heart of a family history.