Chris Dolan (born 1957, Glasgow, Scotland) is a
Scottish novelist, poet, and playwright.[1] He is married to Moira Dolan and they currently live in
Glasgow with their children.[2] He is a lecturer in English Literature at
Glasgow Caledonian University and is Programme Leader of the master's degree programme in Television Screenwriting there.[3]
Dolan has published four novels (Ascension Day, Redlegs, Potter's Field and Aliyyah), two collections of short stories and two non-fiction books. He has had three full-length stage plays produced internationally, with five shorter pieces and four collaborations with Spanish dramatists. He has written over 50 hours of television, and more of radio drama. He has worked in collaboration with visual artists on several pieces of public art, has published poems, broadcasts regularly and writes for Scottish and London newspapers.
He also translates and adapts drama from Spanish, including Short Spin and Wheesht, and translates his own work into Spanish.[4]
"…Dolan's post-industrial and post-imperialist Glasgow: "[s]uch quiet, modest little groupings of streets, yet their shadow stretched and fell for thousands of miles, as afar as Africa, India, America." This long-range view gives the novel great power, as Dolan draws his characters inexorably together, in the lost, once-great, city on the Clyde." – Christopher Hart,
Scottish Review of Books.[5]
Redlegs (Vagabond Voices, 2012)
"Good things come to those who wait, and this is a good thing… An engrossing and compelling novel... lingering richly in the memory… A fine novel" – The Scotsman.[6]
Short stories
Poor Angels (Polygon, 1995) was shortlisted for the
Saltire Prize, and included both the winning story for 1995
Scotland on Sunday / Macallan Prize (Sleet and Snow), and runner-up the following year (Year of the Vezzas).
"He holds you in a tight grip right from the start and manages to combine a sense of raw nostalgia with a profoundly moving atmosphere of love and loss." –
Scotland on Sunday[7] on Sleet and Snow.
He has written for
BBC Radio Scotland,
BBC Radio 3, and
BBC Radio 4. He has written such screenplays as Poor Angels and Ring of Truth as well as TV drama documentaries such as An Anarchist's Story: The Life of Ethel MacDonald and Barbado'ed both broadcast by
BBC and Red Oil for
Channel 4. He also has written extensively for Taggart, Take the High Road, Machair (TV series), and River City for which he has been writing since its inception.[9]