Description

Alan Franks has been writing and performing songs since he was a student half a century ago. He has appeared at many leading festivals, including Edinburgh and Cambridge and, with the singers Patty Vetta Vetta and Charlotte Moore, recorded five full-length CDs and toured with such established stars as Ralph McTell and the late Jake Thackray.

Several of his compositions have been covered by other artistes, including Fairport Convention, whose version of The Wishfulness Waltz became the title track of an album. His work covers a broad range of styles, from the classic ballad The Banks of the Grand Union, to the broad cabaret of a three-minute Paradise Lost.

For more than thirty years he was a feature writer for The Times, covering a wide range of subjects and interviewing such world figures as Arthur Miller, Paul McCartney and Leonard Cohen. During this time he was twice shortlisted for a British Press Award, and since then has written articles for The Guardian, many of them about walking in the English countryside.

He is also the author of several novels and plays, the most recent of which was Looking At Lucian, about the artist Lucian Freud, starring Henry Goodman, at the Theatre Royal in Bath. His poems have won numerous national and international prizes, most recently that of the Wilfred Owen Association for his centenary poem, The Manor.

For the past ten years he has been a member, and occasional hymn composer, for the London Gallery Quire, whose repertoire features items from the so-called West Gallery tradition of English hymnody, prominent in the country churches of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Description

White Hill Centre,

Chesham,

Buckinghamshire,

England,

HP5 1AG.