Alexander Masters
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Alexander Masters is an author, screenwriter and worker with the homeless. He lives in Cambridge, United Kingdom.
He is the writer and illustrator of Stuart: A Life Backwards, the biography of Stuart Shorter. It explores how a young boy, somewhat disabled from birth, became mentally unstable, criminal and violent, living homeless on the streets of Cambridge. As the title suggests, the book starts from Shorter's adult life, tracing it back in time through his troubled childhood, examining the effects his family, schooling and disability had on his eventual state.
Masters is a King's College London physics graduate. He was studying for an MSc degree in mathematics with the Open University, and working as an assistant at a hostel for the homeless in Cambridge, at the time he wrote the book with Shorter's active and enthusiastic help.
Alexander Masters won an Arts Council Writers' Award for this, his first book, and went on to win the Whitbread Book-of-the-Year Award in 2005 in the biography category. He also wrote a screenplay adaptation, filmed in 2006 for the BBC and HBO, and broadcast in September 2007. In 2007, he collaborated with photographer Adrian Clarke on the book Gary's Friends, chronicling the lives of drug and alcohol abusers in the northeast of England.
[edit] External links
- Alexander Masters at the Internet Movie Database
- Stuart: A Life Backwards at the Internet Movie Database
- Masters' own web site
- Book review in "The Independent"
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