Episode 14: “The Oncoming Storm” by Bill Kirton
R. B. Wood
Host: R. B. Wood
The April 2023 theme of “Storm” begins with a coming-of-age story by returning author Bill Kirton.
Bill Kirton was born in Plymouth, England, studied French at Exeter University, and graduated in 1962. While teaching at Hardye’s School, Dorchester, he started his Ph.D. on the theatre of Victor Hugo and was a lecturer at Aberdeen University from 1968 to 1989.
He’s also been a voice-over artist, TV presenter and has extensive experience of acting and directing. His directing credits include many French language plays as well as works by Shakespeare, Orton, Beckett, and Ionesco. He spent a sabbatical year at the University of Rhode Island Theater Department, which commissioned translations of 3 Molière plays from me, one of which he directed himself. The script also won third prize in the British Comparative Literature Association’s Annual Translation competition, 1999.
Bill wrote and performed songs and sketches in revues at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, stage plays, two of which were commissioned by Aberdeen Children’s Theatre, and radio plays for the BBC, two of which were also broadcast in Australia.
Since the late 1990s, his writing has concentrated on prose fiction. He has written many short stories and ten novels, two of which have won awards, with a third being long-listed for the Rubery International Book Award.
Bill has held posts as a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at universities in Aberdeen, Dundee and St Andrews and, since 2015, have been the organiser of a Scotland-wide scheme which places professional writers in schools to help students with the transition to writing at university. He still gives workshops in schools from Orkney to Dundee as part of the scheme and he’s written five books in Pearson Educational’s ‘Brilliant’ series on the study, writing, and workplace skills. Bill also co-authored ‘Just Write’ for Routledge.
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