John Mortimer is a playwright, novelist and former practising barrister. During the war he worked with the Crown Film Unit and published a number of novels, before turning to theatre. He has written many film scripts, and plays both for radio and television, including A Voyage Round My Father, the Rumpole plays, which won him the British Academy Writer of the Year Award, and the adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. His many collections of Rumpole stories are published in Penguin, as well as a volume of his plays, two volumes of his acclaimed autobiography, Clinging to the Wreckage and Murderers and Other Friends, and In Character and Character Parts, which contain interviews with some of the most famous men and women of our time. His novels include Summer's Lease, Paradise Postponed , Titmuss Regained (its sequel), Under the Hammer, all of which have been made into successful television series, Charade, Dunster, and Felix in the Underworld.
John Mortimer died in 2009.