Hampstead Arts Festival - ADD EVENT

Richard Coles

Richard Coles is a musician, chaplain and radio presenter. He first performed as a choirboy in Northampton. He moved to London in 1980 and worked as a theatre musician before joining Bronski Beat to play saxophone. He and singer Jimmy Somerville left in 1984 to form The Communards and went on to have a string of hits, including Don’t Leave Me This Way, the biggest selling single of 1986. In 1990 he gave up pop stardom to pursue theological studies at Kings College London. He went on to compose music for films and television and present Night Waves on Radio Three, as well as writing for newspapers, magazines, television and presenting on Radio Four and Radio Five before finally surrendering and going to theological college. He was ordained in the Church of England in 2005, worked first in a parish in Boston, then Knightsbridge, and is Chaplain to the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he continues to write and broadcast when time allows.

Piers Plowright

Piers Plowright was born in London in 1937 and made a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature in 1998 without writing a single book (although he did write a thriller called ‘The Smuggler’ in 1975, intended for learners of English, which has been translated into Basque and still sells. A collectors’ item). However, he had spent the previous 30 years making radio plays, documentaries and features for the BBC, including literary portraits of Olivia Manning, Yukio Mishima, Jorge Luis Borges, Grazia Deledda, Alberto Moravia, Arthur Waley, and Naguib Mahfouz, as well as working with young British writers.

While at the BBC, Piers won three Prix Italias for his documentaries, and numerous Sony Radio Awards. In 2005 he was made an Hon DLitt at Bournemouth University, and an Audio Luminary at the Chicago Third Coast Radio Festival in 2007.  He currently runs the literary side of the Hampstead Arts Festival and organises conversations with distinguished figures in the Arts and Sciences at Burgh House Hampstead. He’s also trying to improve his drawing, painting and jazz-piano playing (he notes: 'don’t hold your breath').

Piers’s five part series “Thames Crossings” was recently heard on BBC Radio 4.