John Elsom BA, PhD was born in Essex in 1934, studied at Brentwood School and Magdalene College, Cambridge. After leaving university, where his first stories were published in Granta, he became a writer, working as a free-lance journalist, an author and a playwright. He teamed up with the pianist and composer, Sally Mays, whom he married, and together they broadcast and performed short stories to music, and wrote one musical play, Peacemaker. They have two sons and four grandchildren. During the 1960s, Dr. Elsom worked as a script reader for Paramount Pictures, wrote for the BBC and was the regular theatre critic for London Magazine. He started his own theatre company and was a founder member, and later the chair, of the Bush Theatre in Shepherds Bush, West London. He joined the Liberal Party, stood as a candidate at national and regional elections, and claims to be the first parliamentary candidate to place green issues high on his manifesto. After publishing his first book, Theatre Outside London, he joined The Observer and then the BBC’s The Listener as a theatre critic, contributing and presenting arts programmes for the BBC and LBC in London. He was invited to contribute a discussion document, Change and Choice, on arts policy for the Liberal Party, which was widely influential, and started (with Chris Green) the Liberal Party’s Arts, Broadcasting and Heritage Committee, whose manifesto was hailed by The Guardian as a blueprint for cultural policy in the 21st century. He wrote other theatre books, including (with Nicholas Tomalin) The History of the National Theatre and Cold War Theatre; and became the chair of The International Association of Theatre Critics, a cultural non-governmental organisation, affiliated to UNESCO. He staged more than fifty international meetings during the years that saw the ending of the Cold War; and was decorated by the Romanian President, Ion ILiescu, for his services to international culture. He joined the Department of Arts Policy and Management at City University in London; and started the first arts criticism course, to be taken in association with post-graduate degrees in cultural policy. He chaired the pre-selection committee of the Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre for six years; and the Society of Hermes, which promoted contemporary music. In 2000, he founded with colleagues Arts Interlink, an international arts management consultancy, of which he is now the director, and headed their consultancy team in Hong Kong. His plays include One More Bull, The Well-Intentioned Builder, Malone Dies (adapted from Samuel Beckett’s novel for the late Max Wall) and The Man of the Future is Dead, staged at the 2006 Edinburgh Festival and the Bucharest Spring Festival in 2007.
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