Giles Cooper (Giles Stannus Cooper) Biography

British playwright, born in Carrickmines, County Dublin, educated at Lancing College. He was an actor and television script-editor until 1955, when he became a full-time playwright for stage, television, and radio. His works for the stage include Everything in the Garden (1962) and The Spies Are Singing (1966). The Other Man (1964), his best-known work for television, offered a disquieting alternative version of relations between Britain and Germany during the Nazi era; it was also adapted as a novel (1964). The finest of his many plays are his works for radio, which freed him from the constraints of naturalistic realism and permitted an imaginative engagement with Britain's post-war malaise which formed the thematic centre of much of his work. Mathry Beacon (1956) and Unman, Wittering, and Zigo (1958) are generally considered his masterpieces for radio. He was killed in a fall from a train in Surrey in 1966. The Giles Cooper Award instituted in 1978 is Britain's most coveted prize for radio drama.