Jonathan Smith
Jonathan Smith
Jonathan Smith (b. 1942) was brought up in Wales and went to Christ College, Brecon. He read English at Cambridge, taught at Loretto School, Edinburgh and in Melbourne, and from the late 1960s onwards at Tonbridge School, where he was Head of English for seventeen years. Wilfred and Eileen (1976) was his first book, based on the life of Wilfred Willett (1890-1961) and Eileen Stenhouse (1892-1961), just before and during the First World War; it was dramatised by BBC television in 1981. Jonathan Smith has written five more novels, one of which, Summer in February (1995), was recently made into a film with a screenplay by the author. He has written more than twenty plays for BBC Radio 4 and published two memoirs, The Learning Game (2000) describing his life in the classroom, and The Following Game (2011) about being a cricketer father (his son Ed played cricket for England). He is married and lives in Kent.