11 Facts About Jeremy Brooks

Jeremy Brooks was a novelist, poet, and dramatist.

Jeremy Brooks is best known for his novels and for his stage adaptations of classic works, particularly a series of Maxim Gorky plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Jeremy Brooks's novels were praised for their lyricism and for their "Chekhovian mixture of comic concision and pathos".

Jeremy Brooks was born in Southampton in 1926 and went to Brighton Grammar School until, with the onset of World War II, he was evacuated with his family to Llandudno in North Wales, where he attended John Bright school.

Jeremy Brooks then attended Camberwell School of Art, where his wife, the painter Eleanor Brooks, was a student.

Now settled in London, Jeremy Brooks wrote his fourth novel and worked for New Statesman, The Sunday Times and the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych, becoming Literary Manager there in 1964.

Jeremy Brooks had never made any money from his novels and now with a family of four children, he needed to earn.

Jeremy Brooks wrote screenplays ; television scripts for directors such as Karel Reisz and Ken Loach and a great number of important and memorable adaptations of classics for the stage.

The above is typical of the reviews he received at publication in the UK, yet perhaps Jeremy Brooks himself contributed to burying this book.

Jeremy Brooks had never been a good salesman of his most personal work and, in speaking of Smith, As Hero, he often lamented what he saw as a formal error in the book; this was a foray into metafiction with the introduction in a late chapter of a character called Jeremy Brooks.

Many British writers simply carried on regardless in the old tones, but Jeremy Brooks perhaps felt the change too deeply.