One of the Britain’s most successful screenwriters, Andrew Davies, has given his literary archive to De Montfort University Leicester (DMU)’s renowned Centre for Adaptations and Centre for Textual Studies for digitizing.
Famous: Andrew Davies wrote the adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which made a star of Colin Firth
Andrew Davies - who wrote the film screenplay of Bridget Jones’s Diary and the adaptations of BBC dramas Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace and House of Cards - is a visiting professor and has an honorary doctorate from DMU.
The archive includes manuscripts, unfinished work, notes and unpublished material as well as a wealth of correspondence.
DMU will preserve the archive and the Centre for Adaptations has been awarded a grant by the university to fund a research assistant who will begin the archiving process and digitise the material.
Collection: Professor Gabriel Egan collecting the archive from Andrew Davies, right
Professor Deborah Cartmell, Director of the Centre for Adaptations, said: “We are very honoured and pleased to have received this archive.
“Andrew Davies is a very important figure in Adaptations. He is one of the few adaptors whom people seek out to work with specifically and the amount of work which he has done over the years is staggering.
“He is able to make the books he adapts more accessible and appropriate to the way we live now, which is a rare gift.”
The Centre for Adaptations brings together academics from Drama, English, Film Studies and New Media, working across the faculties of Technology, home to Leicester Media School, and the Faculty of Art, Design and Humanities.
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It hosts the journal Adaptation (Oxford University Press) and the book series Adaptation Histories (Bloomsbury). It also organises workshops across universities in Europe and America, and is home of the Association of Adaptation Studies.
Next month, Professor Cartmell will host In Conversation with Andrew Davies as part of the Association of Adaptation Studies Conference, being held at Senate House on September 24 and 25.
Andrew Davies was made a Visiting Professor of the Centre for Adaptations in 2009 and in 2013 he spoke about his career and his BBC adaptations Little Dorrit and Bleak House at the University’s annual Cultural Exchanges festival.
Posted on Friday 14 August 2015