Meet this year’s collaborators

We’ve worked with various collaborators this year on a range of texts: ancient, modern, new and pre-loved.

Composer of TABLOID!!!, Gary Carpenter studied composition at the Royal College of Music, London with Humphrey Searle, Thea Musgrave, and John Lambert, and participated in master classes with Nadia Boulanger. He has lived in Holland and Germany and has written operas and musicals including: The Streets of London, (Her Majesty’s Theatre, 1981), Goodnight Mister Tom – The Musical, and China Song (Vivian Ellis Prize 1999 and tour). He has also written ballets (mainly for Nederlands Dans Theater), a radio music-drama (The One Alone with Iris Murdoch) and a great deal of concert music.  He has been the musical director and/or arranger-orchestrator on many stage shows and films (including The Wicker Man [1972]), his Azaleas for Harp Trio received a 2006 British Composer Award in the chamber category. CDs include SET (orchestral works) and Die Flimmerkiste (chamber works). A dark folk album co-written with Matthew Deighton for the band Magnet will be released in 2025.Gary holds a professorship at the Royal Northern College of Music and lectures at the Royal Academy of Music. 

Mike Kenny, author of THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT, is one of the UK’s leading writers specialising in young people’s theatre. He was included in the Independent on Sunday’s list of Top Ten Living Playwrights and his plays are performed regularly throughout the UK and all over the world. In 2000, he was Arts Council England’s first recipient of The Children’s Award for Playwriting for Children and Young People. His Olivier Award-winning adaptation of THE RAILWAY CHILDREN for York Theatre Royal has had several successful revivals at Waterloo and Kings Cross stations, as well as at the National Railway Museum. In Canada it won the People’s Choice Award following its record-breaking run in Toronto.  Upcoming productions and commissions include the book for a musical version of Ted Hughes’ THE IRON WOMAN; an adaptation of one of C.J. Sansome’s Shardlake novels for York Theatre Royal; a companion piece to his classic play BOY WITH A SUITCASE for Schauburg Theatre in Munich; and RAPUNZEL ALONE for 24th Street Theatre in Los Angeles following their critically acclaimed production of Mike’s WALKING THE TIGHTROPE which the L.A. Times called “an indelible must-see for all ages”.

Our editor Alexander Moore started his career in the creative industry as an actor, working across the UK and Europe. This naturally transitioned into roles creating and directing workshops and plays. In 2012, he toured with Theatre Blah Blah Blah in a production called Hide and Seek, about the ethics surrounding our annual “celebration” of Bonfire Night. The play explored historical figures, murder, torture, and the religious persecution that ultimately motivated the Gunpowder Plot. He has written and directed plays for young people and led many workshops about understanding Shakespeare’s texts, script development, and modern social issues like internet safety. He has edited over 50 books for children and young adults, and numerous academic manuscripts written by eminent law professors and published internationally. He has collaborated with writers of fiction, biographies, and screenplays, but also with universities, charities, and regional businesses. On his website – AdvancedEditing.co.uk – he writes articles about grammar, points of style, and effective approaches to writing in English.

And our long-standing collaborator, Paul Warren, has illustrated all our publications since we began in 2021. Paul Warren has always sketched and drawn and painted images. In 2013, after renting studio space at Harrington Mill Studios in Long Eaton, he began drawing on an iPad and he has drawn on an iPad ever since.    He calls his artwork, Momentism. A phrase he has coined is “the iPad is my sketch pad” and it fits very well. His drawing style is continually evolving and developing. He draws people, the human figure and adds a sprinkling of artistic license. He doesn’t strictly create pictures; he’s interested in facial expression, stance, form, interaction between members of society, a moment in the workaday activities. Whilst “A SPELL IN THE ARMY” was written and produced in 1988, Paul was in the army between 1961 and 1964. He remembers the last call-up chaps being demobbed when he joined the battalion after basic training and his images are impressions of memories of those early days as a young, innocent rookie in ill-fitting khaki denims.