And when did you last see your father?

(engaging film based on book)

BIOGRAPHY

Blake Morrison was born in Skipton, Yorkshire, in 1950. He was educated at the University of Nottingham and University College, London. He worked for the Times Literary Supplement between 1978 and 1981 and was then literary editor for both The Observer and the Independent on Sunday. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a former Chairman of the Poetry Book Society and council member of the Poetry Society, a member of the Literature Panel of the Arts Council of England and Vice-Chairman of English PEN.

His non-fiction books include And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993), an honest and moving account of his father's life and death. It won the J. R. Ackerley Prize and the Esquire/Volvo/Waterstone's Non-Fiction Book Award and was made into a film in 2007, starring Colin Firth. As If (1997), is about the trial of the two young boys convicted of killing the toddler James Bulger in Liverpool in 1993, andToo True (1998), is a collection of essays (and stories). His poetry includes the collectionsDark Glasses (1984), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award, and The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper (and Other Poems) (1987). A selection of his poems, Pendle Witches, was published in a special edition in 1996, illustrated by the artist Paula Rego.

Blake Morrison's first novel, The Justification of Johann Gutenberg, a fictional portrait of the 15th-century printer and the inventor of movable type, was published in 2000.

His critical work includes The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (1980) and Seamus Heaney (1982). He is editor (with Andrew Motion) of The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982) and wrote a book for children, The Yellow House(1987), illustrated by Helen Craig. His play, The Cracked Pot (1996), is an adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's Der Zerbrochene Krug. Both this and his version of Sophocles'sOedipus (2001) were produced and performed by Barrie Rutter's theatre company Northern Broadsides. The same theatre company went on to perform his version ofAntigone in 2003 and published Antigone and Oedipus (2003) in a double volume the same year. He is the author of the screenplay for The Bicycle Thieves, a short film for Channel 4 Television. He also wrote the libretto for the opera Dr Ox's Experiment with music by Gavin Bryars, with whom he has recently collaborated on a second opera, 5.

Blake Morrison lives in London. His book, Things My Mother Never Told Me, a memoir of his mother, was published in 2002.  His most recent novel is South of the River (2007).

And When Did You Last See Your Father? (2007) 

And When Did You Last See Your Father? is Blake Morrison's moving and candid memoir of his father in the weeks leading up to his death. When Arthur Morrison was diagnosed with terminal cancer he had only a few weeks left to live. Morrison traveled to Yorkshire to stay with his mother in the village where he grew up. He visited his father at the hospital where he had spent so much time with his own patients as a GP. As his father's condition worsened Morrison contemplated their shared experiences, the intimacies and the irritations of their relationship. After his father's death Morrison questions the nature of the bond between them, articulately expressing the contradictions, frustrations, love and loss bound into the complicated relationships which most of us have with our parents as we grow up.