Sally Wainwright is a British BAFTA winning television writer and
playwright. She won the 2009 Writer of the Year Award given by the RTS in 2009
for Unforgiven. She is known for work on the BBC dramas Happy Valley and Last
Tango in Halifax. The latter won BAFTA's award for best series, and Wainwright
was voted best writer. Early life
Wainwright was born in Huddersfield in 1963 to mother Dorothy Wainwright.
Wainwright was brought up in Sowerby Bridge where she attended Triangle C of
E Primary School and Sowerby Bridge High School. She attended York University,
reading English and Related Literature. Career
After university she took a play to the Edinburgh Festival and found an agent
for her writing in the process. Meanwhile, she worked as a bus driver.
She left the driving job after she started writing for the Radio 4 series
The Archers. One of her contributions was to write an atypical story for the
long running radio soap in which the village shop was robbed. After that she
wrote for Coronation Street, developing her writing skills, from 1994 to 1999.
She has since said that working on continuing drama was a great education
in discipline and a lesson that great stories are hard work. She was mentored
by Kay Mellor who encouraged her to stop writing for soaps and to concentrate
instead on original work. She created the TV series At Home with the
Braithwaites about a woman who had secretly won the lottery. The programme
was nominated for many awards. She won the 2009 Writer of the Year Award given
by the RTS in 2009 for Unforgiven which took several awards including best TV
series. Wainwright says that her strong female
flawed characters are almost real to her and arrive fully formed in her
imagination. She likes to control the television that is created and has done
some directing and production of her own work partly to ensure the scenery and
dialogue reflects Yorkshire. In 2011 she wrote Scott and Bailey, a series about
two female police officers. The idea for the series came from the leading
actresses and former Detective Inspector Diane Taylor, who assisted with bringing
the series to the air. Wainwright based the plot of her series
Last Tango in Halifax on the story of her mother who was widowed in 2001. Her
mother, Dorothy, moved to Oxfordshire to live with her daughter and rediscovered
a lost love, Alec Walker, via Friends Reunited. With her mother's permission,
Wainwright developed the story of how she remarried so rapidly, publishing
series extracts to her mother before broadcast.
When she told the story to Nicola Shindler, she suggested she turn her
mother's experience into a television series. Shindler became the series'
executive producer. Both Last Tango in Halifax and her crime series Scott and
Bailey were turned down by both the BBC and ITV before both were accepted
respectively. The former was voted by BAFTA to be best series in 2012 and
Wainwright was given the award for best writer.
Happy Valley, which was shot in Yorkshire's picturesque upper Upper
Calder Valley and Hebden Bridge, stars Sarah Lancashire, whom Wainwright had in
mind as she wrote the role. Wainwright made her directorial debut with episode
4 of the first series. Personal life
Wainwright lives in Oxfordshire. She is married with two children and owns two
Maine Coon cats. Filmography
= Original television productions= Her original television productions
include: Happy Valley
Last Tango in Halifax Scott & Bailey,,,,
Unforgiven Bonkers
Dead Clever The Amazing Mrs Pritchard
ShakespeaRe-Told: The Taming of the Shrew
Jane Hall (for which she drew on her own experiences as a bus driver in the 1980s
The Canterbury Tales 'The Wife of Bath' Sparkhouse
At Home with the Braithwaites = Soap operas=
She has also written for the following soap operas:
Children's Ward Coronation Street
Emmerdale The Archers
References External links
Sally Wainwright at the Internet Movie Database
@spiceyw on Twitter