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Hello and welcome to the Lynne Truss website. What will you find here? Well, the make-up of this site eerily reflects the proportions of my own life: i.e. there's a tiny bit representing life itself (see Biog) and then pages and pages of work, work, work (see Books, Audio, Journalism, Broadcasting, etc).
After decades of saying that my greatest ambition was to write for the stage – and decades of writing drama for radio instead – I have finally written a play in which lights come up, and lights go down, and people come on and do funny things without anyone having to describe them for the audience’s benefit; in other words, I can now die happy. The play, Hell’s Bells, is a 45-minute comedy that was performed at the Pleasance in the Edinburgh fringe throughout August. It concerns three people recording an audio commentary for a DVD of an obscure 1990s costume drama called Mrs Milliner (a fictional series, similar to The House of Eliott, that I invented about ten years ago). Why I gave my play a title requiring a possessive apostrophe, I don’t know. I must have been mad.
There have been quite a few publications and events since I last properly updated this page. Among them would be a lovely reissue of Stella Gibbons’s novel Westwood from Vintage Classics, which I wrote the introduction for. This was a book I once adapted for radio, and I love it very much, so it was a big thrill to see it in the shops at last (it hadn’t been in print since 1946). Around the same time, a very clever take on Eats, Shoots & Leaves was published by Collins Educational. Brilliantly assembled by Clare Dignall, it’s a punctuation work-book that really makes sense, and it’s called Can You Eat, Shoot & Leave?
The fourth series of Inspector Steine was broadcast on Radio 4 last October-November. Any day now, I hope to hear that it will be available as a download from AudioGo, which will be marvellous, because this last series, The Return of Inspector Steine, was a joy to make. Robert Bathurst joined the regular cast, playing the modest but heroic Captain Hoagland (“My men used to call me Hoagy”). The plan now for Steine is to make occasional longer plays for radio (fingers crossed for a Christmas special next year); I’m also planning to write Inspector Steine as novels.
I am writing this in June 2012, with genuine good intentions for updating this page more often, so I will dare to be a bit time-sensitive here. Recently in May (on May 1, 8 and 15), Radio 4 broadcast a live recording of my old Tidal Talk monologues, which were done in Bristol in March in front of an audience. Four of the original cast were able to come: Alison Steadman, Geoffrey Palmer, Bill Wallis and Tony Robinson reprised their roles as anemone, hermit crab, periwinkle and lugworm. Samantha Bond and Sean Power joined us for the limpet and the goby fish. Oddly, no one who heard it realised these were old pieces representing a much earlier stage in my writing career. I really hate it when that happens.
I took a six-month holiday from writing, and spent it at the Courtauld Institute in London mainly groaning in libraries and being worried to death (it’s a long story). Should I have taken the dog on a Scottish road trip instead? Possibly. But either way, returning to my desk, I felt thoroughly refreshed, and took on mountains of new work. I even agreed to appear on The Now Show in March, which was jolly brave of me, I think. Journalism-wise, I have a new weekly column in the Sunday Telegraph’s “Seven” section, and a monthly one in Saga. Over the summer, I will be at the Open for The Times in July, and then covering the Olympics for The Times and Radio 4’s Today programme – which is pretty scary considering I know nothing whatever about athletics.
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