Sue Curtis (research and poem compilation)
Teacher, academic, director, actor- Sue Curtis approaches her work as writer and librettist from the solid foundation of a lifetime’s varied experience of literature and theatre.
She took her first degrees, a B.A. in English Literature and Psychology, and a B.Hons (First Class) in English Literature, at the University of Natal,. An M.Phil in English Literature, awarded for a thesis on Jacobean Drama and the Morality Tradition, from the University of York, followed. She trained as an actor at Mountview in London, and took her PGCE at King’s College, London.
An inspirational teacher, she has spent much of her life as an academic, lecturing at universities in South Africa, Austria, and England, and teaching English at King Edwards School in Bath .
While at King Edwards, she founded a Department of Drama and Theatre Studies, which she ran for twenty years. When she left, Drama was available throughout the school and at GCSE and A Level. During the time she ran the department, her passion for theatre and her commitment to professional production values communicated itself to her students, over 150 of whom now work in the industry as actors, writers, directors ,stage, lighting, sound and costume designers, fundraisers, producers, theatre managers and film-makers.
She worked as a actor and as an award-winning director in Austria, South Africa and England.
Since leaving teaching, she has worked full time as a writer and librettist., collaborating with the composer Jools Scott.
Sue has written stage plays, operas, musicals and children’s stories, and has just completed her first screenplay.
Apart from time cheerfully spent raising three children – all of whom now work in media and design in London – running a theatre, running for the council in Haringey – she has devoted her life, one way and another, to drama as literature and as theatre.
Her work is varied; dark, subtle, intelligent and funny; she is as happy writing lyrics for Elizabethan characters as dialogue for modern teenagers or Victorian vampires; as much at home having fun in a child’s world of imagination as revelling in the intellectual thuggery of Jacobean satire.
