Nick Awde

The son of the international lawyer who formulated laws integral to global shipping of containers, he was raised in Nigeria, Sudan and Kenya before being sent to the Jesuit Catholic boarding school Stonyhurst College in the UK. His parents divorced when he was a teenager. After the divorce, his father moved to Northern Ireland and his mother moved to Germany. Despite the above, most of Awde's teenage home life was spent in Soho and the West End of London. He studied Arabic and the Hausa language at London's School of Oriental and African Studies. After graduation, he worked for several years on building sites and English instruction in Spain. Afterward, he became a journalist.

With Chris Bartlett he co-wrote the comedy drama Pete and Dud: Come Again, a hit at the Assembly Rooms at the Edinburgh Festival in August 2005 before transferring to London's West End at The Venue, in March 2006, then doing a 90-date tour of the UK the following year. The play examines the comic relationship that existed between comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore of Beyond the Fringe; set in a chat show during the early eighties, the play tells their tale from the perspective of Dudley Moore, by then an international film star.

In 2007 two other plays followed, premiering at the Edinburgh Festival. Written with Chris Bartlett, directed by David Giles and starring Jessica Martin and Jason Wood, Unnatural Acts is a comedy about two flatmates, a gay man and a straight woman, who try to have a baby together. Written by Awde and directed by Jon Bonfiglio, Blood Confession is a violent drama about an interrogation, about a child murder from 25 years ago, that goes horribly wrong.

In 1993, Awde wrote, composed and produced Andrew Lloyd Webber The Musical, described as "a bizarre mix of spoof and satire" by The Virgin Encyclopedia of Stage & Film Musicals. A pastiche of the life of top musical composer Lloyd Webber, in loving homage to Mel Brooks' The Producers, it ran in a variety of fringe venues across London with several casts. Awde's 1994 follow-up Margaret Thatcher: The Musical failed to find backing. Awde's other stage works are Eros and the Skull (Bloomsbury Theatre, London, 1988) – a multi-created one-man show about the French poet Baudelaire – and Semtex & Lipstick (King's Head Theatre, London, 1992) – a drama for actor and actress about love and political torture. He also co-designed costumes for historical drama Tewodros (Arts Theatre, 1987).

In 2003 he published his first novel, The Virgin Killers, as part of The Public School Chronicles series. It is a thriller about murders of priests at a Catholic prep school in the wilds of Lancashire that lead to a trail of Jesuit and Freemason conspiracies deep within the British Establishment.

He has been a theatre critic since the early 1990s, and has been writing for The Stage newspaper for most of that time. Together with Gerald Berkowitz, in 1999 he set up theatreguidelondon.co.uk. He worked on The Voice during a key period of the fight for black empowerment in the UK, frequently with immediate impact, as when he wrote a front-page headline that contributed to a riot in Brixton the following day and attempted siege of the local police station.[1]

As an illustrator and cartoonist, over the years he has worked for newspapers such as The Voice and The Weekly Journal – where he was the regular profile illustrator for several years – City Limits and The Guardian newspaper. His cartoons also illustrate comedian Llewella Gideon's The Little Big Woman Book. He has done illustration work for Spanish educational publishers and has run a wide range of cartoon strips in specialist publications such as Boogie (music press, Spain), London Student, Untitled, The Wharf and The Stage.

As Nicholas Awde, Hill has written or edited books on non-European languages and cultures, including a Chechen Phrasebook, a Georgian Phrasebook, Women in Islam: An Anthology from the Qur'an and Hadiths, An Illustrated History of Islam and an Arabic Dictionary. He has written three other dictionaries for Swahili, Serbo-Croatian and Hausa, as well as 15-plus dictionary-phrasebooks. He has commissioned many authors, particularly from the Caucasus, editing and designing their books for other publishers. He is also a long-standing consultant on the Caucasus, and, with Fred James Hill, runs the publishing companies Bennett & Bloom (academic) and Desert Hearts (general arts).

• Migraaaants!, translation from French of Matei Visniec's play (2016)
• Jason (...and the Fleeced) (2016)
• Khojaly: The Play (2016)
• The Europeans (Antwerp) (2015)
• Translator's Introduction (in Italian) in La Bella Tarantola nel grano e altre storie di Puglia (2015)
• Hecuba, translation from French of Matei Visniec's play (2015)
• The Europeans (Bruges) (2014)
• Jamie and the Mountain Monsters, featuring Matt Panesh aka Monkey Poet (2014)
• Translations from Romanian of Occidental Express, Spider and Decomposed Theatre, in Matei Visniec: How to Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients and Other Plays (2014)
• HEADS UP! (The Prisoner of Terminal 4, or: Hague’s Miranda Samba) – A Flash Mob Satire (2013)
• Jimmy Savile: The Punch and Judy Show (2013)
• Noddy Holder's A Christmas Carol Unplugged (producer, director & musical arranger, 2011)
• Blood Confession (2007)
• Unnatural Acts (2007), with Chris Bartlett
• Pete and Dud: Come Again (2005), with Chris Bartlett
• Andrew Lloyd Webber: The Musical (1994)
• Semtex & Lipstick (1993)
• Eros & the Skull (1988), with Peter Stevenson & John FitZgeRald
• Design: Tewodros (1987)[4]

• Paradox of Choice, Mindgames – vocal session (2015)
• Mellotronic Belgian Blues (as Nick Awde, 2015)
• Close to the Edge B/W Rocket Man/Meryl Streep (as Nick Awde & Desert Hearts, 2010)
• Always Tomorrow, The Reform Club with Norman Baker (2013) – sessions, Mellotron
• Comandamenti di Auriti, Heather Beaumont, Venice Biennale (2013) – voices