Collection: Peter Mortimer

Peter Mortimer is a playwright, poet and editor who has been closely involved with the north-east literary scene since the early 70s. He has written 22 plays which have been performed in the region by the likes of Live Theatre Co, Durham Theatre Co, Theâtre Sans Frontières, Pocket Theatre, Cloud Nine and Dodgy Clutch, as well as on BBC Radio 4. A commission for the Customs House, South Shields, to write a play based around the little-known Yemeni seamen's riots in that town in 1930 led to RIOT, first produced in 2004 and since revived. He is the founder and artistic director of Cloud Nine Theatre Productions, which was established in 1997 and only commissions new work, only by northern writers, and has thus far produced new plays by eleven dramatists, including Julia Darling, Tom Hadaway, Sean O'Brien, Kitty Fitzgerald, and Steve Chambers. In summer 2004, as part of the Writing on the Wall five-year project (run by Arts UK Ltd) he developed a play which the actors walked along the Roman Wall, performing each night, taking in ten different venues. Peter Mortimer is also the founder and editor of Iron Press, which since 1973 has brought out a whole range of new poetry, fiction and drama, from this region and elsewhere, and continues annually to publish four or five important new titles. Mortimer's own poetry has been published by, among others, Flambard and Iron; I Married The Angel of the North came out in 2002 from Five Leaves Press. His children's collection of poems, Utter Nonsense (illustrated by Geoff Laws, Iron Press), is in its seventh edition since first appearing in 1979. Flambard also published his children's fable, Croak, The King & A Change in the Weather (illustrated by Gaynor Devaney).