Biography
Chapman began his career as an actor at Cambridge (he played Hamlet in the ADC’s centenary production and was president of the Marlowe Society) before holding a spear at Stratford-Upon-Avon, working in repertory and then joining Joan Littlewood’s revolutionary Theatre Workshop where he turned to writing. Among his stage plays are High Street China, Guests and One of Us. His television plays have won awards from the Mystery Writers of America and the Writers Guild as well as a Bafta nomination. He edited, with an introduction, The City and the Court, a collection of five Jacobean comedies.
He enjoyed a long career in television, favoured by Granada TV during its early days. His best known work includes Spindoe (1968), the controversial Big Breadwinner Hog (1969) and many adaptations, including M.R. James' Lost Hearts, Jane Eyre, Eyeless in Gaza and a considerable number of expansions on Roald Dahl's short stories for Tales of the Unexpected. Single plays for television include two entries in Play for Today and Blunt (1987), a look at the Cambridge spies.
His ten published novels are: A Waste of Public Money, My Vision's Enemy, Big Breadwinner Hog, Christoferus, Wartimes (two novellas in one volume), The Secret of the World, The Duchess's Diary, Sancho's Golden Age and Pasamonte's Life. These last three titles form a trilogy extending the lives and experiences of characters found in Don Quixote. Reviewing the first book of the trilogy The Duchess’s Diary in the Times Literary Supplement E.C. Riley said that it "shows a truer understanding of Cervantes than twenty books of criticism" while Karl Miller in the London Review of Books acclaimed Chapman’s "learned and yet fully animate invention".
Chapman's latest novel is Shakespeare's Don Quixote - a novel in dialogue featuring Shakespeare, Fletcher and Cervantes as they scrutinise a version of the lost play Cardenio, co-starring Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as presented in a fringe theatre today.
His novel-in-dialogue, Look Who’s Talking, is scheduled to be published in autumn 2012.
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