CRAIG WARNER
…is a multiple award-winning playwright and screenwriter who lives and works in Suffolk, England.
He has written for film and television, stage and audio. His play Strangers on a Train, produced by Barbara Broccoli, ran in the West End to standing-room audiences.
He was nominated for a BAFTA for The Queen’s Sister, a WGA Award for Julius Caesar, and he won Best Writer at the Seoul International Drama Awards for The Last Days of Lehman Brothers. He has twice won Giles Cooper Awards for Best Plays of the Year for his audio dramas written for the BBC.
He runs the audio production company 25th Image, for which he produces and directs the two-hand comedy NIGHT GAMES about a pair of irrational, infantile men, one gay and one straight, trying to live together under a single roof. He stars in the comedy alongside Michael Maloney. Night Games has appeared in charts in more than nine different countries, rising to number 5 in Great Britain.
Warner has just finished his first novel, Dark Matter, a romantic thriller etched in the perverse rulebook of Quantum Physics.
He is also a composer and has written music and songs for a number of his works, including a full-length musical for BBC Radio 3 about the legend of Cassandra.
Craig Warner also paints in oil and water-based media, mostly exploring the figurative. He received a BA in philosophy from King’s College London and an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. He was born in Los Angeles.
TELEVISION AND FILM
Craig Warner wrote The Queen’s Sister for Channel 4, which was nominated for several BAFTA awards (including Best Single Drama), Maxwell for BBC2, which received a Broadcasting Press Guild Award nomination for Best Single Drama, and The Last Days of Lehman Brothers, which was longlisted for a BAFTA Craft Award for Best Writer and which won him the award for Best Writer at the Seoul International Drama Awards. He wrote the mini-series Julius Caesar for Warner Bros., which gained Warner a Writers Guild Award nomination for Best Original Long-Form Drama, and he performed a complete, uncredited production rewrite of The Mists of Avalon, also for Warner Bros. The mini-series was nominated for a Writers Guild Award and nine Emmys, including Best Mini-series. Warner also wrote the screenplay for Codebreaker, a film about Alan Turing.
THEATRE
Craig Warner started out writing for the theatre in New York City in his early 20s, where he wrote and directed his first intelligible one-act play for performance at Divine Theatre, a basement in the East Village.
His play Strangers on a Train, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, ran in London’s West End to packed houses and starred Jack Huston, Laurence Fox, Miranda Raison, Imogen Stubbs, Christian McKay, and MyAnna Buring. It was directed by Robert Allan Ackerman and produced by Barbara Broccoli.
RADIO PLAYS / AUDIO FICTION
Craig is committed to audio fiction and feels it to be a medium very close to his spirit, because of the interplay between the seen and the unseen.
His first radio play for BBC Radio 4, GREAT MEN OF MUSIC, was included in Radio 4’s first Young Playwrights Festival. His second audio play, BY WHERE THE OLD SHED USED TO BE, won the Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Play of the Year, and it was published by Methuen. His play FIGURE WITH MEAT also won Best Play two years later. Craig Warner is the award’s youngest ever winner, having received it for the first time when he was 24.
Craig recently created the podcast channel 25th Image and started producing his own work and the work of other creatives.
Craig plays Jack in the comedy NIGHT GAMES, about a straight man who knocks on a gay man’s door one night during a storm, and never leaves.
Craig is currently preparing the mystery-thriller VANISHING POINT, set in the near future, where a man and his AI attempt to look for his lost sister, his lost past, and his lost self. He hopes to create not only a gripping mystery about a man seeking key truths about his own past, but a drama that will inform listeners about environmental issues while it engages and entertains.
