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PETER GRIMSDALE

Peter Grimsdale is a novelist and television producer whose titles include Perfect Night (Orion 2008) and Just Watch Me (Orion 2009).

Peter was born in Yorkshire in 1955 and grew up in Sheffield where his father Lawrence Grimsdale was HM Inspector of Schools. He attended Rowlinson School, Sheffield until 1968 when he transfered to Bedales School in Hampshire.

In 1973 he won an AFS Scholarship to East Brunswick High School, New Jersey before starting his college degree course at Sussex University, majoring in American Studies. In 1976 he won a year's scholarship to Georgetown University, where he was awarded the Wagner Prize for Fiction. That year he was also an intern in the Congressional office of Rep. Charles B Wrangel. After completing his degree at Sussex, Peter returned to Washington DC and worked as a reporter for Pacifica Radio's National News Bureau.

In 1980 he joined the BBC as a Trainee Assistant Producer working on programmes including Nationwide, The Holiday Programme and the landmark documentary series charting the history of British Industry, All Our Working Lives. After a secret filming assignment in Albania for Adam Curtis's film The Cost of Treachery, he was sent to Sri Lanka in 1984 to help make a Real Lives about the plight of the Tamil Community following the uprising against them the previous summer. His time there was the inspiration much later for his first novel, Perfect Night.

After producing on another social history series, Angela Holdsworth's Now the War Is Over, he became Series Producer of Crimewatch UK, then moved back into history on Peter Pagnamenta's Nippon, the story of Post-War Japan.

In 1990 he transferred to the BBC's Features department in Bristol to make Small Objects of Desire and indulged his passion for transport in Perpetual Motion, a history of vehicles that had lived way beyond the expectations of their designers - including the Morris Minor, London's Routemaster Bus and the Royal Enfield Bullet motorbike. His first co-production, with A&E in the USA was another transport series, Locomotion - The World the Railways Made, a collaboration with the author and financial journalist Nicholas Faith.

In 1994 he was appointed Channel 4's Commissioning Editor of Religion & Features where his eclectic brief ranged from the Witness documentary strand to The Adam & Joe Show, both of which won Royal Television Society awards in 1998. In that year he added History to his portfolio and launched The Real biography strand and the car magazine show Driven.

He returned to the BBC in 1999 as Head of Factual for the Independent Commissioning Group, but a year later he was back at Channel 4 heading up its venture into Cross-Platform content. In 2002 he oversaw the C4's third edition of Big Brother, featuring Jade Goody. During this period he began what would become his first novel, Perfect Night. The following year he left television for Yahooto take up the newly created position of Editorial Director, Europe, however he was lured back to TV in 2004 for a stint as Channel Five's acting Controller of Science.

Since then Peter has continued in television as a freelance executive, writer and producer on a range of factual programmes including Bear Grylls Man V Wild for Discovery Channel, The Story of US for the History Channel and Jonathan Dimbleby's An African Journey for BBC 2.

Perfect Night, his first novel is heavily inspired by his TV experiences. The narrator Nick Roker starts out as a promising TV director, but his career is brought to an abrupt end when the boat carrying his star reporter is blown up off Sri Lanka. Back home he takes a job in a film archive, where he discovers a single frame of lost film that suggests a twist to what happened in the boat explosion. The quest for the truth soon puts him at odds with the authorities as he starts to lift the lid on a major international coverup. Just Watch Me, published a year later also touches on another side of his television life after watching the effect Big Brother had on the team running the show week in week out. He is currently working on his third novel, due for publication by Orion in 2011.