Write On Holiday

After a couple of years at the teaching coalface and a couple more as a downtrodden temp, Serena Mackesy spent ten years as a journalist before jumping over the wall to become a novelist. During that time, she wrote thousands of colour features, first-person columns, fictional columns, TV reviews, travel pieces (she was shortlisted for Travelex Travel Writer of the Year in 2002), interviews, restaurant reviews and spoofs, mainly for The Independent, but also for The Times, The Express, Conde Nast Traveller and many glossies and women's magazines, and thoroughly digested the old Fleet Street maxim that you can get a thousand words out of anything.

In 1999, she adapted her Independent fictional column, The Temp, as a novel. It became an instant bestseller. She has since published two more critically acclaimed novels, Virtue and Simply Heaven, and has had a number of short stories anthologised over the years. A fourth novel, Hold My Hand, will be published by Constable Robinson in late 2007. She continues to pay for her holidays by writing about them afterwards, and has received funding from the Royal Literary Fund, which officially rubber-stamps her work as being "of literary merit". More self-puffery can be found at www.serenamackesy.com.

She generally works in bed.

Kay was born and brought up in Leeds. Having left school in order to raise her family, and with no O-levels or A-levels, Kay returned to education in her twenties, gaining several O-levels and then studying a BA Hons degree in Drama at Bretton Hall College, Leeds University. Her stage plays include, In All Innocence for West Yorkshire Playhouse, and A Passionate Woman, also at The West Yorkshire Playhouse which was subsequently transferred to the West End Comedy Theatre where it ran for a year followed by five national tours and has had productions all over the world.

In television she co-devised and co-wrote Children’s Ward with Paul Abbott for Granada Television and it ran for twelve series. She was also sole devisor of the bi-weekly daytime soap Families, and the young people’s drama Just Us, for Yorkshire Television, the third series of which won the 1993 Royal Television Society Award for Children’s Drama and the 1994 Writer’s Guild Award.

This was followed by Band of Gold for Granada Television nominated for a BAFTA for Best Serial and the Prix Italia Award. It won the 1996 Royal Television Society Award, ITV Programme of the Year and the 17th American Cable Ace Award. Other successful series include, Playing the Field, which ran for three series and won Best Independent Drama Series, and Fat Friends, which was BAFTA nominated, won the Television and Radio Industry award and TV Quick award.

Kay also wrote the 2003 series, Between the Sheets, A Good Thief, and Gifted, a one off drama, broadcast autumn 2003 on ITV1; and she has also adapted Jane Eyre for LWT. For film, Kay has written Some Kind of Life which was nominated for a BAFTA and won the Prix Niki Award, Girls’ Night, starring Brenda Blethyn, Julie Walters and Kris Kristofferson, and Fanny and Elvis, which she also directed, and which won the Audience Award at Dinard and the Fort Lauderdale Festival Award. In 1998 Kay was awarded a BAFTA – the prestigious Dennis Potter Award. Her latest television productions have been The Chase for BBC (re-commissioned for a second series) and Strictly Confidential for ITV.

Mervyn is currently the Executive Producer at the BBC for Casualty and Dalziel and Pascoe. He started his career as a writer and he had two 60’ single dramas produced, Hands for Thames Television and Family Man for Yorkshire TV. Mervyn then moved into TV production and he produced over 700 episodes of Coronation Street, during two stints as Producer. He also produced the series First Amongst Equals, Floodtide and Wipeout. He then moved across to Yorkshire TV as Deputy Head of Drama and Producer of Emmerdale where he produced 464 episodes. In 1991 he moved to the BBC where he produced Casualty and Down to Earth before his current promotion to Executive Producer.