Abi Morgan

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2018

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Abi Morgan is a screenwriter and playwright best known for TV dramas The Hour, River and The Split and the films Shame, Suffragette and The Iron Lady. She won two Emmy Awards for The Hour, as well as two BAFTAs for Best Single Drama for White Girl and Sex Traffic, and Meryl Streep won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. Born into a theatrical family - her father was a theatre director, her mother is an actress - she only began to write during her university days at Exeter. After graduating, she kept herself afloat by waitressing while continuing to write and had her first play performed professionally in 1998 when she was 30. She's become known for her gritty storylines in the dramas Murder, Sex Traffic, and Tsunami, but has also adapted several books for both the small and the big screen including Brick Lane, The Invisible Woman, and Birdsong. Abi lives in London with her long-term partner, the actor Jacob Krichefski, and their two teenage children. Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:03.0	Hello, I'm Kristi Young.
0:05.0	Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item
0:12.0	that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.
0:16.0	For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast.
0:22.0	You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website.
0:30.0	Music
0:50.0	My castaway this week is the stage and screenwriter Abbey Morgan, whether it's film, TV or theatre, it's drama, with a capital D,
0:58.0	that dominates much of her work.
1:00.0	Big, diverse subjects like women's suffrage, the tsunami, satirism, people trafficking, the First World War, world-shaping events,
1:09.0	made personal and vividly poignant by her pen.
1:13.0	It's perhaps unsurprising that she began by writing for the stage.
1:17.0	Her mother is the actress Pat England, her father, the late theatre director, Gareth Morgan.
1:23.0	As a child, homework would be slogged over in theatre cafes and bit parts taken up in her dad's productions.
1:29.0	Indeed, for a very short time, she thought working with other people's lines would suit her too, and she tried her hand at acting.
1:36.0	But, unlikely as it may seem, a monologue about a woman eating a lettuce put paid to that, and set her on the road to becoming one of Britain's most prolific contemporary dramatists.
1:47.0	Her series Sex Traffic Alone, 1-8 BAFTAZ.
1:51.0	She says, when writing, you can become.
1:55.0	The thing about it is, you set yourself a riddle every day to solve, that is very satisfying.
2:02.0	It is order amid chaos. Welcome then, we hope to the calm of the desert island, having wondered.
2:08.0	Tell me then, this idea, it's intriguing one, setting yourself a little riddle every day.
2:13.0	What form does that take as you sit down to write?
	...

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