Ray Connolly has written novels, movies, television films and series, radio plays, short stories and much journalism. After graduating from the London School of Economics, he began a career in journalism at the Liverpool Daily Post, before writing a weekly interview for the London Evening Standard. Since then he has written for the Sunday Times, The Times, the Observer and the Daily Mail.
Working with producer David Puttnam, he wrote the films That’ll Be The Day and Stardust, and wrote and directed the feature length documentary James Dean: The First American Teenager. He has also written for television, including the films Forever Young and Defrosting The Fridge, and the series Lytton’s Diary and Perfect Scoundrels. He also co-wrote the George Martin documentary trilogy about music, The Rhythm of Life for BBC2.
His novels include A Girl Who Came To Stay, Sunday Morning, Shadows On A Wall and Love Out Of Season. There have also been the biographies Being Elvis – A Lonely Life and Being John Lennon – A Restless Life.
For radio he wrote ‘Sorry, Boys, You Failed the Audition’, which he later adapted as a novella, as well as Lost Fortnight, which was about Raymond Chandler in Hollywood, Unimaginable, concerning the 24 hours around the death of John Lennon (whom he was due to see on the day the former Beatle was murdered), and Devoted, an account of his 102 days in intensive care, and nearly six months in hospital, with Covid in 2020.
He is married to Plum Connolly, has three children and two grandchildren, and lives in London.
Of everything I’ve ever written, my novel Sunday Morning is the piece of work of which I’m most proud. When it was first published in 1992, I told its story by jumping backwards and forwards through the decades, from the early Sixties to the Eighties. It worked well, I thought. Then I moved on to other projects.
For some reason, though, the characters and story of Sunday Morning continued to loiter in my mind, to the extent that recently I began to wonder – might it have been a better book, if I’d told the story sequentially?
It took a while, but eventually I decided that the only way to find out was to publish a new version of the story, which, without losing a single character, scene or line of dialogue from the original, would tell in sequence how a group of friends launch a tiny magazine in London in 1963.
After which, against the background of the Sixties’ cultural explosion, youthful innocence, a ribbon of news, love affairs, wars, lies, music, infidelity and murder, not overlooking the dissolution of the Empire, they, and we, see the little magazine grow over the decades into a media conglomerate.
I’ve called the new version of the story Sunday Morning Revisited, because that is exactly what it is. But, of course, those who prefer the original will find that Sunday Morning is still available.
Read more about the book here.
