TuDiabetes Talks Episode 4 – Film Writer Neil Fleming on “Banting and Best” Diabetes Film Project

Neil Fleming is a British writer of stage plays, movies, TV, poetry, and fiction, and a theatre translator from German and French.
The author of Wild Justice, The Consultant, Musik, and Sphinx, he is a former journalist and publishing executive. He is principal writer, general manager, and a company director of Hydrocracker Theatre Company, which he co-founded in 2003.

His 2011 play The Consultant ran to sell-out audiences for two month’s at London’s Theatre503. In 2005, Neil’s Musik, an adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s 1905 play of the same name, appeared for three months at the Arcola Theatre London, after a first run at Plymouth Theatre Royal in 2000. The play was published by Oberon Books in 2005.

He is currently working on a series of new plays on the theme of revenge, Wild Justice, the first in the series, premiered at the Brighton Festival in 2014, where it won an Argus Angel Award.

Neil’s script for a feature film, Unspeakably Wonderful, about the 1921 discovery of insulin, is under option in 2016 to UK film company Angry Man Pictures.

He is currently contracted to write a six-part television series, provisionally entitled A Barren Land, for UK film and TV company Clownfish Films. He is also writing a young adults’ science fiction novel, Connie, and an espionage feature film set in the 1970s, Cold Fire.

He won the 2005 Kent & Sussex International Poetry prize and was shortlisted for the 2008 Bridport Prize. His poetry has been published in leading UK poetry magazine The Rialto.

Neil has also made a number of translations of contemporary German plays, most recently Do Not Pass Go, from Ulrike Syha’s Herr Schuster Kauft Eine Strasse, originally commissioned and performed in 2010 by the German National Theatre in Mannheim. Neil’s translation was performed as a reading in February 2015 by Voyager Theater in New York, and appeared in the October 2014 issue of US translation journal Asymptote.

His translation Fish Soup, of German playwright Paul Brodowsky’s play Stadt Land Fisch was performed in August 2005 as part of the international Tampere Theatre Festival in Tampere, Finland. and again in 2007 at New York ‘s HotINK festival in January 2007, alongside Superheroes, Neil’s translation of Austrian playwright Ewald Palmetshofer’s Helden. Digging, translated from Austrian playwright Christian Winkler’s Graben, was performed at the 2010 HotINK festival.

A journalist for 17 years before turning to creative writing, Neil worked in East Africa, South Africa, the Middle East and Britain, reporting on wars, famines, wildlife, politics, business, and the international energy industry. In 1995, he was awarded the International Association of Energy Economist’s prize for energy journalism. From 1997-2002 he was global editorial vice-president of McGraw-Hill energy information business Platts.

He holds a First Class Honours degree in Modern and Medieval Languages from Trinity College, Cambridge; and spent a post-graduate year studying Theatre History at the University of Vienna as a post-graduate.

Married, with three children, he lives in Suffolk in the UK.

www.hydrocracker.co.uk

www.neilfleming.co.uk