Christopher Fitz-Simon was born in Belfast. He received a Moderatorship in Modern Languages & Literature from Trinity College, Dublin. He has worked as Artistic Director of the Irish Theatre Company, the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, and Literary Manager of the National Theatre Society (Abbey & Peacock Theatres, Dublin). He is the author of a large number of broadcast plays, including a BBC Italia Prize entry (The Dead) and two RTE Italia Prize entries (for original plays, Vina and A Snowman in July) as well as dramatizations from, inter-alia, Boucicault, Bowen, Colum, Forzano, Giraudoux, Joyce, Forrest Reid, Somerville & Ross, Stoker, Wilde, etc. His most popular work was the BBC’s Ballylenon, celebrating envy, hatred and malice in 1940s small-town Ulster, which ran to 42 installments; other popular BBC series have been Spangles‘n’Tights and Faithful Departed.
Among his many books are THE BOYS, a biography of Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLíammóir, founders of the Dublin Gate Theatre (Nick Hern/Gill-Macmillan/Heinemann: “By far the most wide-ranging and atmospheric description of Dublin’s wartime theatre” – Clair Wills in That Neutral Island); ELEVEN HOUSES: a memoir of 1940s Ireland (Penguin: “The sense of total recall is astonishing… it is painfully funny” – Roy Foster, Irish Times)
His Doctorate in Literature is from the University of Ulster. He has just completed selecting and editing Rise Above: The Letters of Tyrone Guthrie and will read selections at Irish Repertory Theater on Tuesday, April 24, 2018. He has been a member of the governing bodies of the Dublin Theatre Festival, Wexford Festival Opera, Siamsa Tíre, the Royal Irish Academy of Music, and more.