Michael Frayn is married to the biographer and critic Claire Tomalin. He also wrote the screenplay for the film Clockwise (1986), a comedy starring John Cleese.

His films for television include First and Last (1989), for which he won an Emmy, and an adaptation of his 1991 novel A Landing on the Sun. He has also translated a number of works from Russian, including plays by Chekhov and Tolstoy. A book of memoir, My Father's Fortune: A Life, was published in 2010, was shortlisted for the 2010 Costa Biography Award, and won the 2011 PEN/Ackerley Prize. Recent books are Stage Directions: Writing on Theatre 1970-2008 (2008), and Travels with a Typewriter(2009). His latest play for the Royal National Theatre is Afterlife (2008). His play Democracy (2003), is set in 1960s Berlin. His plays include Alphabetical Order (1975), Clouds (1976), Donkeys' Years (1977), Make or Break (1980), Noises Off (1982) and Benefactors (1984).Ĭopenhagen (1998), about the 1941 meeting between German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his Danish counterpart Niels Bohr, first staged at the Royal National Theatre in London, won the 1998 Evening Standard Award for Best Play of the Year and the 2000 Tony Award for Best Play (USA).

Michael Frayn is also the recipient of the 2002 Heywood Hill Literary Prize.

His most recent novel is Skios (2012) a comic novel on a case of mistaken identity. Spies won the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award and the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia region, Best Book), and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Book of the Year. More recent novels include A Landing on the Sun (1991), which won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Headlong (1999), the story of the discovery of a lost painting by Bruegel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and Spies (2002), a story of childhood set in England during the Second World War. He then worked as a reporter and columnist for The Guardian and The Observer, publishing several novels including The Tin Men (1965), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award, The Russian Interpreter (1966), which won the Hawthornden Prize, and Towards the End of the Morning (1967). Playwright, novelist and translator Michael Frayn was born in London on 8 September 1933.Īfter two years National Service, during which he learned Russian, he read Philosophy at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn