04/06/2010

ON THE SHOW THIS WEEK

Hannah McGill is the Artistic Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, which opens on June 16th. She was born in Shetland in 1976, grew up in Lincolnshire, and studied English Literature and Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. Before taking up her current role in 2006 she was a critic and columnist working for a number of publications including The Scotsman, The Herald, The Times, Uncut, Time Out, Art Review, The Guardian and Sight and Sound. She has also lectured in Film Journalism at the University of Glasgow and written short fiction and drama.

Paul Morley wrote for the NME between 1977 and 1983 and was a member of the eighties group, The Art of Noise. As art director for the pop group Frankie Goes to Hollywood he was responsible for the 'Frankie Says...' T-shirts. He's published several books about music including Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City, and Ask: The Chatter of Pop, a collection of his NME journalism. A memoir, Nothing, a true fantasy about the effects of his father's suicide, was published by Faber in 2000. Paul . He has also contributed to Anton Corbijn's book of U2 photography, U2 and I. He has written for Esquire, GQ Magazine, The New Statesman, The Guardian, The Observer and The Sunday Telegraph.

Stella Duffy is a novellist, actor and comedian. Her book, The Room of Lost Things, was longlisted for the 2008 Orange Prize and won Stonewall Writer of the Year. She created the character, Saz Martin, the Private Investigator who appeared in five of her novels between 1994 and 2005. She's also written several plays and short stories and won the 2002 CWA Short Story Dagger for Martha Grace from the Tart Noir anthology she co-edited with Lauren Henderson. She has performed with the experimental theatre company, Improbable and with the Comedy Store. Her solo show, Breastrokes, was Time Out and Guardian Critic’s Choice. She also writes for theatre and radio with a particular interest in improvisation. Her new historical novel, Theodora - Actress, Empress, Whore has been published this week.

Mat Collishaw is one of the prominent Young British Artists who along with Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin, came to the attention of the British public at the Sensation Exhibition at London's Royal Academy in 1997. His breakthough work, Bullet Hole was a blown up photo installation of a wound in a person's head and much of his subsequent work has looked at the juxtaposition of violence and beauty His work has been exhibited throughout Europe and the United States. He has used a range of media for his work but has largely focussed on film, photography and video. His work also contains historical and art-historical references to the interaction between nature and culture. Often the images are digitally altered, the underlying theme being the relationship between representation and reality.