David Hare + Michael Cunningham

To mark the publication of his memoir, The Blue Touch Paper, playwright David Hare (Skylight) talks to writer Michael Cunningham about the intersections of love, fate and politics in his life and work.

“The Blue Touch Paper encompasses exquisitely rendered love stories, rousing arguments about the relationship between art and politics, great gossip, and far, far more. A book that contained only one of those pleasures would be good news; a book that contains all of them is a legitimate treasure.” -Michael Cunningham

About the Speakers

David Hare is a playwright and film-maker. He has written over thirty stage plays which include Plenty, Pravda (with Howard Brenton), The Secret Rapture, Racing Demon, Skylight, Amy’s View, The Blue Room, Via Dolorosa, Stuff Happens, South Downs, The Absence of War and The Judas Kiss. For film and television he has written more than twenty screenplays which include Licking Hitler, Dreams of Leaving, Saigon: Year of the Cat, Wetherby, Damage, The Hours, The Reader, and the Worricker Trilogy: Page Eight, Turks & Caicos and Salting the Battlefield. He has also written English adaptations of plays by Brecht, Gorky, Chekhov, Pirandello, Ibsen and Lorca. In 1997 the French honoured him as an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres, and in 1998 the British knighted him for services to the theatre.

Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, Specimen Days, By Nightfall, and The Snow Queen. He received the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel The Hours. A film version of The Hours was directed by Stephen Daldry and featured Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep. The film received nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and a win for Nicole Kidman as Best Actress. He has written one nonfiction book, Land’s End: A Walk Through Provincetown. His collection of fairy tales, A Wild Swan and Other Tales, with illustrations by Yuko Shimizu, will be released in November 2015. He is currently a senior lecturer in the English department at Yale University.