Alex and the Winter Star

Ann Coburn lives in Berwick upon Tweed and the wild landscape of NorthNorthumberland often features in her writing, which has a strong sense of place and a commitment to good story telling. Get Up & Tie Your Fingers, her first play, was premiered at the Borders Festival by Berwick-based theatre group, Fourth Wall Productions. It went on to have a successful run at the 1996 Edinburgh Festival. Get Up & Tie Your Fingers won the Arts Council’s 1997 John Whiting award for new theatre writing and has since been toured nationally four times by NTC Touring Theatre Company, as well as enjoying a sell-out run at Sage: Gateshead in a version performed by The Guild of Lillians and various women’s community choirs, with music specially composed by Karen Wimhurst. NTC have also commissioned and toured five other Ann Coburn plays: The Devil’s Ground and Safe (for which Ann was awarded the 2000 C.P.Taylor Bursary) for adults, and Alex and the Warrior, Alex and the Winter Star, and The Last Snowrider for children. Ann’s play, Daytime, a funny and moving look at the ethics of Jerry Springer-style talk shows, was written in 1998 and performed at Newcastle Playhouse as part of the North East’s Future Tense festival. Ann is also an award-winning fiction writer for young people. She has published twelve books so far, the most recent being Glint for older readers, and the Dream Team series for younger readers. When not writing under her own name, Ann leads a parallel life as a children’s fiction ghost writer. Her television work includes Refuge, a drama produced for ITV by Lightyears Films. Ann has also written for ITV police drama, The Bill. Ann works with other authors and playwrights of all ages, as a mentor and a tutor. She is currently tutoring on the MA in Creative Writing at NewcastleUniversity. For further details about Ann’s work, visit her website: www.anncoburn.com