Michelle, our July ’23 speaker is best known for her first novel, Goodnight Mister Tom, which won the 1982 Guardian Prize for British children’s books and has been adapted several times for screen or stage. Two of her other well-known works are Back Home and A Little Love.
She lives in Petersfield, Hampshire and lived in Australia and Singapore as a small child.
Michelle trained for the theatre at the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama in the late sixties and at Marcel Marceau’s L’École Internationale de Mime in Paris. She has a postgraduate Certificate in Film Studies (BFI/London University), an Honorary Doctorate (Portsmouth University) and has been made a Fellow of Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance.
As Mikki Magorian she has performed in plays, musicals and one-woman shows, has written the book and lyrics for the musical version of Goodnight Mister Tom (Composer Gary Carpenter), Sea Change(Composer Stephen Keeling), Tinsel (Composer Bob Buckley) and Hello Life! (Composer Alexander L’Estrange). A few years after Goodnight Mister Tom was performed in Manchester and Ipswich, it was screened on television starring the late John Thaw, winning seven television awards including a BAFTA.
Just Henry is a TV drama adapted from her Costa Book Prize winning novel of the same name. It is set in post-Second World War Britain and premiered on ITV1 on 18 December, 2011.
Back Home – A book for young adults about an evacuee returning home after WW11 was made into a TV drama with Hayley Mills (1990) .
Her most recent work includes Broken Soil (2021) – an adult book on WVS farmworkers and evacuees in Kent during WW11 and Looking for the Diamond (2021).