Chris Dolan

Although Chris Dolan's early work was initially devoted to the stage – his play The Veil premièred at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 1991 – he has since remained tirelessly innovative, often re-working his material through a variety of different mediums, converting short stories into plays and screenplays into novels. His first published work, Poor Angels and Other Stories (1995) featured 'The Mystery of Sabina Vasiliev' – which was later transformed into his second play Sabina! (1998), a bitter-sweet comedy about Czech exiles living in Glasgow during the time of the Velvet revolution in 1989. Tereza, a teacher, is the jealous tip of a love triangle featuring Sandra (one of her students) and Matthew (her landlord) – whom the former seduces by pretending she is a famous dissident on the run from the authorities. It won Dolan an Edinburgh Festival Fringe First Award in 1996, and was adapted for BBC Radio 4 in 2000. As Jan McDonald put it, this play was part of a generation of Scottish playwrights' 'increasing engagement with wider European culture' – and stands alongside other efforts such as David Grieg's Europe (1993), John Clifford's Losing Venice (1985), Marcella Evaristi's Commedia (1982) and Ann Marie di Mambro's Tally's Blood (1990).

Devoting more time to fiction and journalism, Dolan published his first novel in 1998, the comic Ascension Day. Beginning with the surreal incident of people ascending to the clouds on a dull afternoon, the plot is a Kunderesque fancy on modern-day angels. It was later awarded the McKitterick Prize in 2000. That same year, Dolan was a recipient of the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Award, which allowed him to take up residency at the Hôtel Chevillon at Grez-sur-Loing – one of Stevenson's favourite haunts during the 1870s. Turning once more to the theatre, Dolan adapted Bernard Schlink's novel The Reader for the stage in 2000 and then proceeded to write his next original piece, The Angels' Share (2008), which, like its predecessor, was first staged by the Borderline Theatre. The scene opens on Edward, who is sent to turn the ailing fortunes of an island's whisky business around. The play's title stems from the name given to the whisky left in the air during the distillation process. In 2008, Dolan turned to the Greek classics for inspiration for a new short play, teaming up with composer Gerry Rossi to write the story of Hephaistos, the mythical god of fire. Presented at the Oran Mor in Glasgow, Hephaistos features a twenty-strong choir which interacts with the actors during the course of the plot. Thrown from Olympus as a child, Hephaistos is married off to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, who in turn betrays him with Ares, the god of war.

It was while working on a screen play for the BBC production An Anarchist's Story: The Life of Ethel MacDonald (2006) that Dolan was persuaded to further his research on this peculiar figure from early 20th-century Scottish history. Simultaneously a biography – as well as a history of Glaswegian revolutionary politics – Dolan works backwards, as it were, from film to page, revisiting the oft-treated but still widely controversial topic of the Spanish Civil War from a different angle: that of anarchists, rather than from a more mainstream left-wing position witnessed in George Orwell's Homage To Catalonia. An Anarchist's Story is an intimate portrait of Ethel MacDonald: a working-class girl who reported from the front lines of the Spanish Civil war in the late 1930s, as the spectre of fascism settled over Europe. Born into a poor family in North Lanarkshire in 1909, MacDonald left home at 16, working at a number of odd jobs until becoming involved in Glasgow's anarcho-communist movement. In October 1936, and without speaking a word of Spanish, MacDonald went to Spain, where she began working for the Republicans, who were engaged in a war against Franco’s fascists, backed by Nazi Germany. There she began to broadcast on a regular basis for Radio Barcelona, delivering news from the front to the rest of Europe. It was in this capacity that she became informally known as 'the English language voice of the Spanish Revolution'. Published on the centenary of her birth, An Anarchist's Story skilfully reconstructs MacDonald's mysterious life, piecing together the fragments of her arrest, trial, imprisonment and subsequent deportation. In order to recount her experiences, Dolan uses the new journalism technique of collaging contemporary accounts with MacDonald's own words. Ultimately, the book transcends the personal narrative of MacDonald's life to become a parable for Spain's political tragedy and the dashed hopes of an entire generation. Every page rings with a mixture of romantic utopianism and disillusion. Writing in the Scottish Review of Books, Stuart Christie called it 'a fascinating personal account of the pivotal events of the spring and summer of 1937 … a duty of commemoration which is honoured, at least in part, in Dolan’s book.' (Scottish Review of Books, Vol. 5, 1, 2009)

Aside from his books of fiction and works for the stage, Dolan writes regularly for various magazines and newspapers, including Scotland on Sunday and The Independent and since 2002 he has been a literary reviewer and features writer for The Herald. He was awarded the Canongate Prize for Journalism in 1999. He has also written and presented radio features and documentaries for BBC Radio 3 and 4 – as well as for Radio Scotland. His adaptation of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose was broadcast in 2006. As a screenwriter, Dolan's credits including episodes of Taggart and River City.

André Naffis-Sahely, 2011