Profile overview
Richard Woolley has been a film director, performer and musician and is still an active writer and academic.
In the 70s and 80s he wrote and directed several films for cinema and TV, including: Telling Tales (1980), Brothers and Sisters (1981) and Girl from the South (1988).
In 2011 the British Film Institute issued a box set of his films entitled An Unflinching Eye. He has written a range of scripts and published four novels including the whodunit Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands.
He has lived in Berlin, Amsterdam, Hong Kong and Auckland, as well as in his country of origin, England.
He has been Director of the Dutch Film Academy, founding Dean of Film and TV at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, inaugural holder of the Greg Dyke Chair of Film & Television at the University of York and, most recently, Associate Dean of the Faculty of Performance, Media & English at Birmingham City University.
He divides his time between the UK, the Netherlands and New Zealand and currently (2022) works as a screenwriter, novelist and (visiting) professor.
His novel SEKABO, set in the North York Moors of 2097 and 1990, was published by Thames River Press, London, in September 2014.
His next novel STRANGER LOVE deals with the clash between Dutch and Maori in New Zealand/ Aotearoa in December 1642, seen from the perspective of two young people on either side. It was launched in New Zealand in September 2016 and has been selling well.
A more autobiographical book entitled BREAD OF HEAVEN, which also incorporates one of Woolley's unfilmed screenplays from the 1980s, was published in late 2015 and is available in hard copy form and download.
In July 2021 the British Film Institute reissued Woolley's films in a new boxset format along with new commentary tracks and a twenty page booklet. The set can be purchased under its original title AN UNFLINCHING EYE.
Woolley's novel DETACHMENT THEORY was successfully published in June 2022. His next novel PEACE ON EARTH is currently (2024) still being written. He aims to have it ready for publication in 2025.