Colin Sherrard - Biopic

Colin is a British writer whose work explores the long echoes of history across human lives. Born and raised in England, he has lived and worked across two continents, an experience that has profoundly shapes his understanding of identity, memory and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

His debut novel, Only the Names Have Been Changed, was inspired by personal tragedy. Started as therapy, the book developed into an attempt to understand that we can react either well or badly to profound experiences, and that our vulnerability to those experiences are shaped by attitudes instilled in us by our forebears.

The Unwary Peasant, his second novel, represents a deliberate departure: an occasionally warm, occasionally brutal, occasionally witty, exploration of a disturbed character suffering the consequences of a flawed ubringing within a village in Elizabethan Somerset. The range of expression of the English natural world, the dialect, the English seasons, and the primitive built environment of hundreds of years ago, demonstrates the full range of the author’s literary gifts. Critics have noted the remarkable ease with which he moves between register and tone — from the deeply affecting to the delightfully absurd. The setting and dialogue is rigorously researched and authentic.

Colin spends summers in England and winters in Mexico, where he will be at work on his third novel.

Helen Duggins - Biopic

Helen's grandfather inherited a downland farm in East Dorset in the early 1920s. Helen interviewed her grandfather and grandmother and recorded their re-telling of their experiences running the farm in the 1920s, a period of great change in agricultural practice and rural society. Helen has a gift for vividly recounting these experiences, and merging those tales into glorious accounts of wildlife, the weather, and the changing seasons.

The exploration of Tales from a Dorset Downland Farm takes one back a full century or so to a family making its living through a large but economically difficult farm; the tales of hard but highly rewarding labour in an elevated land in a delightful corner of Southern England, are captivating.