BIOGRAPHY

"He's a delightful man with an enormous zeal for life. Before he settled down, it would be a bold man who could predict at the beginning of an evening with Chris where he would be at its conclusion. He floats with enthusiasm (if that's possible) wherever the tide of life takes him, whether it be a country house or a crack den. The same detached vivacity electrifies his work." Dominic Dromgoole. The Full Room, An A-Z of Contemporary Playwriting

Chris Hannan was born in Clydebank, Scotland, in 1958. He is the fourth of five children, the son of a shipyard worker employed at John Brown's yard and a mother who was a primary school teacher.

Hannan says:

"When I first had dreams of becoming a writer I used to wish I had been brought up Jewish. I guess I'd been reading Isaac Bashevis Singer. I was envious of the rituals, the exoticism, the peculiar characteristics of that world - and imagined my upbringing was banal by comparison. Now I can hardly imagine anything more strange than a Catholic childhood in the west of Scotland. Us boys spent half our childhood lighting candles and absorbing mediaeval theology, and the other half kicking a ball around a field till it got dark. Post-modern, not."

After St. Brendan's Primary School in Glasgow, followed by a Jesuit education at St. Aloysius' College in the same city, Hannan went to University College, Oxford, graduating at the age of 20 with a double first in English Literature, before returning to Glasgow to work with homeless people in a night-shelter. Since then he has been a full-time writer. At the age of 39 he married Sarah, a computer-software trainer. He fell in love with her in a chilly town hall one stormy night. "I was at a performance of the North Berwick Amateur Dramatic Society's production of The Mikado. She was playing the oboe solo to The Sun and Moon and she was wearing a white blouse and black skirt. I was powerless to resist."

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