Lesley Thorne Client List
Will Ashon
Will Ashon is a novelist, non-fiction writer and screenwriter, previously a music journalist and founder of the record label Big Dada (where he signed and worked with artists such as Roots Manuva, Wiley, Kae Tempest and Young Fathers), a part of Ninja Tune. He left the music industry in 2014 to pursue his writing full time. Alongside his novels, he has more recently published a selection of non-fiction including Passengers, an original and profound portrait of contemporary Britain told through the testimonies of its inhabitants, Strange Labyrinth, part memoir/part history of Epping Forest and Chamber Music: Enter the Wu-Tang (in 36 Pieces) which focuses in on the debut album by the Wu-Tang Clan. He is currently working on an original feature script, Eden, optioned by and in development with Sleeper Films/Rory Gilmartin; has recently developed a TV project with Alastair Siddons for Element Films, and is currently developing several other original TV and film projects, most recently optioning his pilot In Game Leader to Cowboy Films. Set in the world of e-sports, he is now co-writing this with Oyinkan Braithwaite.
Kevin Barry
Kevin Barry is a screenwriter, playwright and novelist. He wrote the screenplay for the feature film Dark Lies The Island in 2019 which Ian Fitzgibbon directed (and in which Tommy Tiernan appeared) based on his own short stories, as well as a short film with Ian called Breakfast Wine (based on Kevin’s short story) starring Dylan Moran. He has several feature films and TV projects in development (as a screenwriter) including a hybrid animated/live action film adaptation of his novel City of Bohane with producer Rory Gilmartin/MVG Films and School of Humans in the US; a feature adaptation of his novel Night Boat to Tangier for Andrew Eaton’s Turbine Studios and Michael Fassbender’s DMC Films for Michael to star, and James Marsh to direct, we hope in early 2024. His stories regularly appear in the New Yorker, his work has been translated into 16 languages and he has won many literary awards. Night Boat To Tangier, was nominated for the Booker Prize and was one of the New York Times Top Ten Books of 2019. He has just delivered a new novel, A Heart in Winter, a Western love story set in 19th century America about Irish immigrants, which will be published next year.
Oyinkan Braithwaite
Oyinkan Braithwaite is the best-selling author of MY SISTER THE SERIAL KILLER (2018) which has now been translated into 30 languages and sold more than one million copies. It won the 2019 LA Times Award for Best Crime Thriller, the 2019 Morning News Tournament of Books, the 2019 Amazon Publishing Reader’s Award for Best Debut Novel and the 2019 Anthony Award for Best First Novel. It was also shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019, among several other prizes, and longlisted for both the Booker Prize 2019 and the 2020 Dublin Literary Award. Oyinkan has published several short stories over the last eighteen months including The Last Tattoo (McSweeney’s Quarterly Issue 57 & 59), Scold’s Bridle – Homeless Bodies and Other Stories (Audible), Treasure – Hush (Amazon Original Stories), and her new novella The Baby is Mine has just been released in support of adult literacy.
MY SISTER THE SERIAL KILLER is being developed as a feature film by Working Title and producers Nira Park and Rachel Prior/Complete Fiction. Oyin’s adaptation, her first commission, is now out to directors with a view to shooting in 2024. She is also collaborating on two TV projects – Blue Hands with writer/director Louis Lagayette, a limited series set in France and the UK being developed with French producer Joris Charpentier and Joi Productions in the UK. Oyin is also co-writing a pilot episode of a TV drama set in the world of e-sports with Will Ashon, called In Game Leader. Cowboy Films are producing. Oyinkan is also working on her second novel.
Charlotte Cameron
Charlotte Cameron is a screenwriter and former strategy consultant who loves to write resourceful characters navigating impossible situations. Her heroes often wield traditionally ‘feminine’ qualities as their greatest strengths, creating new takes on genre stories. Her feature film script Throw Money is in development with Anne Carey, of Archer Gray, who is currently looking to partner with a UK producer. Throw Money is a taut social thriller set in a London investment bank where a team of office cleaners stage an audacious sting to turn the tables on their corrupt bosses. Throw Money was selected for the NYWIFT Writers Lab mentoring programme backed by Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman. Charlotte’s feature and pilot scripts have won recognition from the PAGE Awards, Austin Film Festival, Shore Scripts, and American Zoetrope.
Based in London, Charlotte is developing several TV and film scripts, one of which we’ll be submitting shortly: Prolonged Exposure is a returnable TV crime show with a damaged but determined trauma therapist at the heart of the story. Comps are Mindhunter and Edge of Darkness.
Stephen Cleary
Stephen Cleary is a screenwriter, freelance consultant and script doctor. He is based in the South of France with his family but has worked most often in the UK, Scandanavia and Australia, where he mainly worked uncredited on a variety of scripts including Sweet Country, an indigenous western set in Australia, and credited on an Australian drama Kid Snow about tent boxing. He started a production company making music films in his twenties working quite a bit for Channel 4, focussing on Jazz, RnB and Soul, which is how he met Nina Simone, filming her performance at Ronnie Scotts one night. He then ghost wrote Nina Simone’s autobiography (at her request), and later, took a job script reading at British Screen. A few years later, he became Head of Development, then left to run Arista, a pan-European development agency. As well as writing the story of his time with Nina Simone as a feature film, which was recently optioned by The Bureau/Tristan Goligher he is also under contract with White Rabbit Books, an imprint of Weidenfeld and Nicolson, for a full biography of this much misunderstood musical genius.
Sebastian Faulks
Sebastian Faulks is a novelist and a screenwriter, the bestselling author of fifteen novels most recently Snow Country. Paris Echo, Where My Heart Used To Beat, A Week in December, Charlotte Gray (adapted as a feature film starring Cate Blanchett) and Birdsong (over 3 million sold) which toured nationally for several years as a stage play and was adapted and broadcast as a two part BBC TV serial starring Eddie Redmayne . He started his career as a journalist and broadcaster working on the Sunday Telegraph then as literary editor of the Independent, and has written two very successful franchise novels – for Ian Fleming’s James Bond series and for P G Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster series. Sebastian has presented factual television for the BBC – Faulks on Fiction – and has adapted (with Rachel Wagstaff) both On Green Dolphin Street and The Girl at the Lion D’Or ( the latter with producer David Parfitt) for feature film which has Trevor Nunn attached to direct. Sebastian has also developed for TV and written a pilot script for Naguib Mahfouz’s ‘Cairo Trilogy’ of novels for which the Egyptian author won the Nobel Prize in 1988. His new novel The Seventh Son is published in September 2023.
Rebecca Frayn
Rebecca Frayn is a filmmaker, screenwriter, director and novelist. She was trained by the BBC as a film editor, before going on to develop a successful career as a freelance director for signature documentaries and also works as a commercials director. Author of two previous novels, One Life and Deceptions, she has just completed a third novel set on Ibiza about a father who is reunited with his illegitimate daughter. Her film about Aung San Suu Kyi, The Lady (dir Luc Besson, starring Michelle Yeoh and David Thewlis), won the International Human Rights Award. Misbehaviour, her feature film based on the 1970 Miss World competition in which the first black winner was crowned and whose televised ceremony was compered by the infamously sexist Bob Hope – the catalyst for a feminist group storming the stage – was released on 500 screens in the UK by Pathe in March 2020.
Jon Hotten
Jon Hotten is an author and screenwriter. His books include Muscle and The Years of the Locust, and he writes the popular cricket blog The Old Batsman. He co-wrote the award-winning documentary Death of a Gentleman, and his collaboration with the former England bowler Simon Jones, The Test, won the Wisden Almanack’s Book of the Year award in 2016. His most recent book My Life and the Beautiful Music is an autobiographical novel based on his 20s as a music critic. Set in the glory days when the music business was a vast and amoral empire where stardom seemed arbitrary and sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll were the lifestyle of choice, he blurs memoir, myth and reality to recreate the last, lost era of a now-vanished world. The Years of the Locust is under option to Fudge Park Productions (company of Damon Beesley and Iain Morris). Jon is also collaborating with Damon Beesley on a TV series set on Wall Street in the 80s called The Vig and has been commissioned to write a pilot script.
Megan Hunter
Megan Hunter’s debut novel, The End We Start From, was published in 2017 in the UK, US, and Canada, and has been translated into ten languages. It was adapted for feature film by Alice Birch, and shot last year starring Jodie Comer and directed by Mahalia Belo, produced by Benedict Cumberbatch’s and Sophie Hunter production company SunnyMarch and Liza Marshall’s Hera Productions. It premieres at Toronto Festival 2023. It was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Books Are My Bag Awards, longlisted for the Aspen Words Prize, was a Barnes and Noble Discover Awards finalist and won the Forward Reviews Editor’s Choice Award. Her latest novel, The Harpy, was published by Picador in the UK and Grove Atlantic in the US, and translated into multiple other languages. Her writing has appeared in publications including The White Review, The TLS, Literary Hub, and BOMB Magazine. She lives in Cambridgeshire with her husband, son and daughter. Megan is currently adapting The Harpy for television with Red Planet Pictures and has been commissioned by Joi Productions to write a feature adaptation of a classic French novel Jacqueline Harpman’s I, Who Have Never Known Men. Megan will also exec produce.
Dom Joly
Dom Joly is a multi-award winning British comedian and writer, best known for his smash hit hidden camera series Trigger Happy TV. Dom’s other comedy television credits include This is Dom Joly, World Shut Your Mouth and Fool Britannia. In 2016 he brought back an updated and brand-new mini series of Trigger Happy to huge acclaim for All4 and Channel4. Dom is also a former diplomat and Westminster TV producer turned columnist and award-winning travel writer whose books include The Dark Tourist and Scary Monsters and Super Creeps and his latest, The Downhill Hiking Club. Such Miserable Weather: Dom Joly’s Big English Staycation was released in June 2021 as an Audible Original, who have also released two series of Dom’s hit podcast Earworm. He is now writing a new travel book called The Conspiracy Tourist which Robinson Books will publish in 2023.With Chris Bell, he has created and has written the pilot for a TV sitcom Due Diligence which is in development with Mark Freeland/NBC. He is currently on tour with his show Holiday Snaps: Travel and Comedy in the Danger Zone and is developing a Trigger Happy TV feature film with his original partner Sam Cadman.
Louis Lagayette
Louis Lagayette is a director and screenwriter based in London. He studied at Queen Mary University of London and Columbia University in New York. Originally from Corsica, he grew up in Paris where he practiced street art and started to make short films. He then moved to London in 2010, where he directed music videos before writing and directing his first feature film: Trendy. Trendy’s script won the Live Script Reading Award at the British Urban Film Festival in 2015. The film premiered in competition at Raindance Film Festival in 2017 and was released digitally in the UK. In 2021, Louis wrote and directed Réelle Vie, a 3×12’ mini-series about the life of French rapper Maes. The project was funded by Universal Music Group and produced by Partizan Films, and viewed more than 5 millions times in less than a month. He co-wrote the series B.R.I. with Jérémie Guez. B.R.I. premiered on Canal + in the spring of 2023, where it was watched 12 million times. Louis also co-wrote Tigers & Hyenas, Jérémie Guez’s upcoming feature for Amazon Prime Video. Louis’s upcoming feature film Red Shore, which is wrote and directed, was produced by Voltage Pictures and Mediawan International. Red Shore is a survival thriller set against the backdrop of the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean Sea. Louis is 31, he is French/British, and bilingual (French/English), so he writes in both languages. He is currently developing film and TV projects
Jonathan Liew
Jonathan Liew is a journalist for The Guardian. In 2021 he was named Sports Writer of the Year at the British Sports Journalism Awards. Before joining The Guardian he was chief sports writer at The Independent. He writes a column for the New Statesman, is a contributor to the Football Weekly podcast and has made frequent appearances on television and radio. In 2020 he was a writer on the BBC One series Jack Whitehall’s Sporting Nation. He recently developed a football sitcom The Red Zone, co-written with Barney Ronay and developed with Sam Mendes. Scripts available on request. He lives between London and Berlin with his wife and children.
Anna Reeves
Anna Reeves is New Zealand born writer and filmmaker based in London. She has written and directed several award-winning short films and a documentary, including two shorts being in official competition at the Cannes and Venice film festivals. Several shorts sold to Canal+, Arte, Channel 4, Television NZ and ABC. She then wrote and directed her debut feature film Oyster Farmer which was nominated for Best Film at the AFI awards and premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in Discovery Section. It was the longest running film that year in Australia and sold to North America and Europe. Alongside developing Carsten Jensen’s bestselling We, The Drowned for television for Deborah Marlow’s Copenhagen-based company, she has created a story universe called Midnights, an original TV series set in contemporary Denmark with fantasy and sci-fi elements inspired by the real history of a Nordic tribe of five thousand people who went missing in the 15th century from Greenland. She is currently developing an original investigative television series called Filth about a female analytical entomologist, set along the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales. The project is in paid development with CJZ TV with development funds from NSW Agency supporting female directors.
Sam Ripman
Sam Ripman is a young screenwriter whose voice captures naturalistic relationships in young, hedonistic culture. He devises gripping original series ideas that blend genre with pop appeal, aimed at generating excitement amongst 18-35s and beyond. He has made a number of short films that have featured on Dazed, The Face, Boiler Room and at The Barbican. For the last three years, Sam has helped shape youth programming at the BBC, most recently as Channel Exec on BBC Three. He’s also a History graduate, who previously taught and did youth work, giving him experience of voices across society that he draws on in his writing. He is developing several TV concepts and has recently been commissioned by the UK office of FilmNation to develop his returnable crime drama Sometimes I Crash about a young racing car driver pulled into the world of high end car theft.
Clara Salaman
Clara Salaman is a novelist and screenwriter. Her serialisation of her latest novel, a suburban Medea story Too Close (pseudonymously published as Natalie Daniels), was broadcast over three nights on ITV1 in April 2021. It was produced by Snowed-In Productions and starred Emily Watson, Denise Gough and Thalissa Texeira. Emily and Denise were both nominated for a best lead actress BAFTA. She is developing several projects for both TV and film including a feature film The Little Utopia adapted from her second novel The Boat (published by Head of Zeus 2014) which Kim Farrant will direct, and a TV series based on her first novel Shame on You which she is developing with The Story Collective and an original series called Déjà vu about a man in crisis who begins to suspect he is experiencing past life regressions as he searches for his missing sister. She has just been commissioned by Film Nation UK to adapt Graham Norton’s novel Forever Home for television. Clara previously trained as an actress at Central School of Speech and Drama and spent 20 odd years working extensively for stage and screen.
Craig Silvey
Craig Silvey is a novelist and screenwriter from Fremantle, Western Australia whose novels include the internationally bestselling novel Jasper Jones (2009), considered a modern Australian classic. Jasper Jones won plaudits in three continents, including an International Dublin Literary Award shortlisting, a prestigious Michael J. Printz Award Honor, and a Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlisting. Craig’s work has been successfully adapted for stage and screen. A film adaptation of his 2012 graphic novella The Amber Amulet was awarded a Crystal Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. Sell out stage adaptations of Jasper Jones have been mounted across Australia by MTC, Belvoir Theatre Company, BGTC, QT and STCSA, and have yielded four Helpmann Award nominations, including Best Play. In 2015, Craig co-wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of Jasper Jones, which was directed by Rachel Perkins and starred Toni Collette and Hugo Weaving. It was nominated in six categories at the AACTA awards, including Best Film and Best Adapted Screenplay. Craig also won Best Feature Film Adaptation at the 2016 AWGIE Awards.
Craig currently has two features in development, and he will take the lead in a television adaptation of his third novel Honeybee, a coming-of-age novel about a trans teenager, published in October 2020, which was a top three bestseller in Australia. Troy Lumm’s Brouhaha have optioned the rights and plan to develop as an ambitious, internationally facing TV drama. Craig is currently touring his first novel for children, Runt, published by Allen and Unwin in Australia and to be published by Knopf in the States in early 2024. He lives in Fremantle with his partner and their daughter.
Matt Thorne
Matt Thorne is a screenwriter, novelist and non-fiction writer, the author of six novels (his first novel published at 23), including Eight Minutes Idle, which won an Encore Award for Best Second Novel and Cherry, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and three novels for children. His first film was developed on the first ever iFeatures Scheme and is an adaptation of his second novel (8 Minutes Idle, 2014, starring Tom Hughes and Ophelia Lovibond). His non-fiction books include the seminal biography of pop star Prince published by Faber and described as “the definitive work on the man” by Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor and he is currently writing a new music book, to be published by White Rabbit/Orion. For screen, he is currently developing a returnable television adaptation of a classic 70s sci-fi novel (Edmund Cooper’s The Overman Culture) with producer Rory Gilmartin/Sleeper Films. His writing has been published all over the world and described as “glorious to read” by the Daily Telegraph and “amusing, poignant, frequently sexy and remarkably sussed” by the Observer. Matt Thorne was born in Bristol in 1974, and lives in NE London with his family. A second edition of his Prince biography is coming from Agate in autumn 2023 and Faber in summer 2024. He is currently working on a new music book.