ABSTRACT
Jane Rogers is a novelist and scriptwriter who writes original radio and television dramas, as well as adapting her own novels and those of other authors for screen and radio. She was nominated for a BAFTA for the television adaptation of her novel, Mr Wroe’s Virgins (1991). She has written a film adaptation of her novel, Promised Lands (2000), which is about the arrival of the ‘first fleet’ in Australia in 1788. Her other novels include Island (2000), which she adapted for radio; The Voyage Home (2005); Conrad & Eleanor (2016); and The Testament of Jessie Lamb (2011), which won the Arthur C. Clarke award and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Several themes recur in her work, including the parent–child relationship and women’s lives. Besides her own work she also discusses Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988), Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1972) and her adaptations of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (2006), E.M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady (1984), R.D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone (1961), Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1978) and Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1994). The interview took place in 2008 at Sheffield Hallam University, where she is Emeritus Professor of Writing.
