Not Guilty: Queer Stories from a Century of Discrimination
Published by Biteback in June 2017 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the passing of partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK in 1967, this is my fifth collaboration with Steve Humphries. His documentary, Convicted for Love, was shown by Channel 4 in July and featured four of the 20 or so men whose stories are told in the book.
These are by turns hilarious and heart-breaking and tell the wider story of the struggle for gay rights in the UK over the past 100 years. I learned a lot!
Surviving Aberfan: the People’s Story
Surviving Aberfan: the People’s Story was written in a matter of weeks and proved the most affecting project I’ve ever worked on. Researching and writing the narrative and transcribing 27 interviews with Aberfan survivors (children and adults), rescuers and bereaved parents meant that I was often in tears and I still can’t read some passages without crying. Read more…
I Heard My Country Calling
Published in October 2015 (and in the US and Canada in January 2016), this is the biography of a little-known wartime special agent whose exceptional story Steve and I first uncovered in The Children Who Fought Hitler. Read more…
Britain’s Greatest Generation
A major collaboration with Steve on the book for this 4-part series for BBC2, shown in May 2015. They tell the stories of ordinary Britons – and a handful of more well-known faces – born between 1910 and 1925 who made such a contribution to winning WW2 and making the world we know today. I wanted to write it because it was such a worthwhile project and because it would be a tribute to my parents – all three of them! It is dedicated to them. Read more…
Love Child
When I was looking for my birth mother I couldn’t find any books that answered my biggest question: ‘Why did she feel she had no choice but to give me up?’ All I could find were misery memoirs or books for social workers. Neither did the job. I needed something accessible but serious that told the hidden story of adoption in Britain in the 20th century. read more…
The Children who Fought Hitler
My second collaboration with Steve, this accompanied the Testimony Films documentary of the same name, first shown on BBC4 in 2009, about a small expatriate British community in Ypres between the First and Second World Wars and how their children grew up to make an extraordinary contribution in that conflict.
Like Love Child, it uses interviews with now quite elderly people to bring out these extraordinary stories. It is based on original research by Jimmy Fox, who is credited as co-author but I did the writing. read more…
Sue on Writing 