History
The union was founded in 1959 as the Screenwriters’ Guild, the successor to the Screenwriters’ Association dating back to 1938. During the 1960s it expanded to cover radio and book writers and adopted its present title in 1964. It sponsored the campaigns of the Writers’ Action Group to establish the Public Lending Right and the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society which – starting from a single room in the Guild premises – has collected and distributed over £100 million in payments to writers for photocopying and overseas retransmission of broadcasts. For many years the Guild hosted the Writers’ Guild Annual Awards, which it plans to revive in November 2007. In 1997 the Guild merged with the Theatre Writers Union, and membership now stands at over 2,100. Presidents, Chairs and leading activists of the Guild have included: Lord (Ted) Willis, Jimmy Perry, Bryan Forbes, Denis Norden, Maureen Duffy, Alan Plater, Rosemary Anne Sisson, Wally K. Daly, Ian Curteis, J.C. Wilsher and David Nobbs. The current President (2007) is David Edgar, the noted playwright, TV and film writer (Nicholas Nickleby for the Royal Shakespeare Company; Pentecost, which won an Evening Standard award in 1994; The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs; Albert Speer, based on Gitta Sereny's biography of Hitler's architect; Playing With Fire; etc.)
Read more about this topic: Writers' Guild Of Great Britain
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of the prophets. He saw with an open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)