Alan Franks is an award-winning author, musician and journalist with many plays, records and poems to his name. In the past four years his poems have won several prizes, including the inaugural Wigtown Competition, Scotland’s largest, and the Petra Kenney Award, judged by poet laureate Andrew Motion. As well as writing poetry he composes and performs songs with the singer Patty Vetta. They have made hundreds of appearances at clubs, festivals and on radio, and the first of their four CDs, “Will” was named by Time Out as one of the top “Roots” albums of 1995. One of the songs, The Wishfulness Waltz, became the title track of a collection by the veteran folk-rock band, Fairport Convention. He also performs his poems regularly at jazz clubs, and is collaborating as a lyricist with the tenor saxophonist and composer, Tim Whitehead. His most recent plays are Previous Convictions, at Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre, and The Edge of the Land, which made a three-month tour of eastern England. His others include The Mother Tongue at Greenwich Theatre, starring Prunella Scales, and Our Boys, with Beatty Edney. His latest play, Augusta, featuring Brazilian film star Antonia Frering, went on London in October, 2008. His prose fiction includes the novel Boychester’s Bugle, published by Heinemann and New English Library, and the novella “Going Over,” which won a competition run by the “New Writer” magazine. As a journalist, he has written for The Times for nearly thirty years. During that time he has written on a wide variety of subjects, and twice been nominated for a British Press Award.

To download his music, visit iTunes and search under 'Vetta and Franks'. Or to buy a CD of Alan and Patty's latest album, go to Patty and Alan's music website.

During his 30-year career with The Times, Alan has been the editor of the paper’s PHS column, as well as writing his own regular feature, Alan Franks’s Diary. This became a book, published by J.M. Dent, and then a radio series for Woman’s Hour, which he read himself. His work has taken him all over the world, climbing a 23,000-feet peak in the Andes, learning how to duet with Tony Bennet at the Frank Sinatra Music School and writing for The Times Saturday Magazine on a wide variety of subjects. As an interviewer he has met and written about a large number of top practitioners in public life and the arts, particularly, music, literature and the theatre/cinema. These include, in music:  Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Paul Simon, Chuck Berry, Brian Wilson, Andrew Lloyd-Webber, Wynton Marsalis, Ravi Shankar, Philip Glass, Peter Maxwell-Davies; in literature: Anthony Powell, Barbara Cartland, Laurie Lee, James Baldwin, John le Carre; in the theatre/cinema: Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Anthony Hopkins and Ian McKellen. Alan is married to Ruth Gledhill, creator of this site. He has four children. His son Simon Franks is a founder member of the Audio Bullys. Simon's brother Jimmy has recently joined the band as guitarist. 

You can watch a video of Alan and Patty performing his haunting beautiful song Arms of the Enemy at the Orange Tree. You can also watch Alan's sons Jimmy and Simon live at Glastonbury this summer and also in Bucharest a few days ago, performing their latest hit Gimme that Punk.