Ashley Bernard
Bernard Ashley lives in Charlton, south east London, only a street or so from where he was born. After National Service in the RAF Bernard trained to teach at Trent Park College of Education, specialising in Drama. He followed this with an Advanced Diploma at the Cambridge Institute and has recently been awarded an honorary Doctorate in Education by the University of Greenwich.
He is now writing full time. Bernard has published in excess of fifteen novels, gaining him a reputation as a 'gritty' writer in sympathy with the under dog. In Margaret Meek's view he gets inside children's heads, who say that this is what it's like for them.
Philip Pullman wrote in The Guardian: 'A commonplace setting, an everyday situation, ordinary characters. Bernard Ashley's great gift is to turn what seems to be low-key realism into something much stronger and more resonant. It has something to do with empathy, compassion, an undimmed thirst for decency and justice. In a way, Ashley is doing what ‘Play for Today’ used to do when TV was a medium that connected honestly with its own time, and what so few artists do now: using realism in the service of moral concern.'
Television work has included Running Scared (from which he wrote the novel), The Country Boy (BBC) and his adaptation of his own Dodgem which won the Royal Television Society award as the best children's entertainment of its year. Bernard serves on the BAFTA Children’s Awards Committee.
His stage plays are The Old Woman Who Lived in A Cola Can (Edinburgh Festival and tour) and The Secret of Theodore Brown (Unicorn Theatre for Children in the West End). He is on the Board of Greenwich Theatre.