Available to Encore, Ovation, Season Circle, Artists Circle and Directors Circle supporters.

Join us to hear from a panel of authors and playwrights from CFT’s past, hosted by Kate Mosse, and learn about how novels are adapted for the stage.

Rachel Joyce, Bryony Lavery, Kate Mosse, Rachel Wagstaff and Philip Wilson will share their experiences adapting literary works for our stages. 

Your ticket includes a welcome drink and the bar will be open for additional refreshments. There will also be an opportunity to ask your own questions of the panel.

To upgrade your support to book for this event, contact development.team@cft.org.uk.

Meet the panel...

Rachel Joyce

Rachel Joyce is the award-winning author of the Sunday Times and international bestsellers The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Perfect, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, The Music Shop, Miss Benson’s Beetle (winner of the 2021 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize) and Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North, as well as a collection of interlinked short stories, A Snow Garden & Other Stories. Her most recent novel, The Homemade God, was published in April by Transworld. 

Having originally been written as a radio play for BBC Radio 4, the full-length novel The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize, and published in 37 languages. Rachel was awarded the Specsavers National Book Awards New Writer of the Year in 2012 and shortlisted for UK author of the Year in 2014. The book was subsequently adapted by Rachel for the 2023 film starring Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton. 

She has also written many original plays for Radio 4, as well as dramatising both classic and new novels, including Henry James and the entire Brontë collection. In 2007 she jointly won the Tinniswood Award for best original audio drama. She is currently adapting Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. 

Rachel Joyce moved to writing after a 20-year career as an actor in theatre and television, performing leading roles for the RSC and National Theatre; and the role of Frances Parnell in Racing Demon at Chichester Festival Theatre in 1998. Last year she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Kingston University.

Kate Mosse 

Kate Mosse is the author of eleven novels & short story collections, including the No. 1 bestselling The Joubert Family Chronicles – The Burning Chambers, The City of Tears, The Ghost Ship and The Map of Bones – as well as the multimillion selling Languedoc Trilogy - Labyrinth, Sepulchre and Citadel - and No. 1 bestselling Gothic fiction including The Winter Ghosts and The Taxidermist's Daughter. Her books have been translated into 38 languages and published in more than 40 countries. She has also written four works of non-fiction – including her memoir about caring An Extra Pair of Hands and Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World.  She has also written four plays – including The Taxidermist’s Daughter which premiered at CFT in 2022 – and contributed essays and introductions to classic novels and collections. Her novel for Quick Reads, The Black Mountain, was published in 2022 and she contributed a story to the international bestselling Miss Marple Collection of Short Stories, Marple. In 2025, she will publish her first book for young adults – Feminist History for Every Day of the Year. 

Kate is the Founder Director of the Women's Prize for Fiction & the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction - the largest annual celebration of women's writing in the world - and is the Founder of the global campaign #WomanInHistory launched in January 2021 to honour, celebrate and promote women’s achievements throughout history. She was awarded a CBE in the King’s New Year’s Honours List 2024 for services to literature, women and charity.  A Trustee of the British Library, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the Society of Authors.

Kate hosts the pre-performance interview series at Chichester Festival Theatre, chairs platform events for the National Theatre, as well as interviewing writers, directors, campaigners and actors at literary and theatre festivals in the UK and beyond. Kate was awarded a Fellowship at the Writer's House in Amsterdam in 2019. She is a visiting Professor of Creative Writing & Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester, a Patron of the Chichester Festival of Dance, Music and Speech and President of the Festival of Chichester.

Bryony Lavery

Bryony’s play Frozen won the TMA Best Play Award, the Eileen Anderson Central Television award, was produced at Birmingham Rep, then the National Theatre, then on Broadway where it was nominated for four Tony awards. It also received a special mention at The Susan Smith Blackburn Award 2008. Stockholm, for Frantic Assembly won the Wolff-Whiting Award for Best Play of 2008. Beautiful Burnout, for National Theatre of Scotland/Frantic Assembly received a Fringe First at Edinburgh. Her Aching Heart won Pink Paper Best Play 1992. 

Theatre: Bryony has written or adapted over 100 plays including A Wedding Story, Last Easter, The Lovely Bones (Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse, Birmingham Rep, Northern Stage and Royal and Derngate Northampton); The Midnight Gang (Chichester Festival Theatre); Brighton Rock (Pilot Theatre); Frozen (Theatre Royal Haymarket); Balls (Stages Theatre Houston/ 59E59 Theatre NYC). 

Recent work includes La Belle Sauvage for The Bridge Theatre, Oliver Twist for Leeds Playhouse/Ramps On The Moon and String [15 Heroines] Jermyn Street Theatre and Midnight Cowboy the Musical. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an honorary Doctor of Arts at De Montfort University and an Associate Artist at Birmingham Repertory Theatre.

Rachel Wagstaff

Rachel wrote the book for Flowers for Mrs Harris, which transferred to Chichester Festival Theatre after premiering at the Sheffield Crucible. The original production won the UK Theatre Award for Best Musical and the London premiere at Riverside Studios won the WhatsOnStage Award for Best Off West End Production. Rachel adapted Sebastian Faulks’s novel, Birdsong, opening in the West End. Her stage version has had five subsequent UK tours with Original Theatre Company. For Agatha Christie Ltd, she adapted The Mirror Crack’d, which has had UK tours, a transfer to NCPA in Mumbai, and various international productions. It was most recently produced at The Alley Theatre, Texas, this summer. Rachel’s musical Moonshadow, co-written with Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), played at the Royal Albert Hall and the Princess Theatre in Melbourne. Rachel also wrote the book for original musical Only The Brave, which opened at the Wales Millennium Centre. With Duncan Abel, she adapted Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train, UK tour, West End, and is currently on a new UK tour. Duncan and Rachel’s adaptation of The Da Vinci Code opened as a UK tour, and transferred to Ogunquit Playhouse, Maine. New productions recently played at Salisbury Playhouse, Vertigo Theatre, Calgary and Drury Lane, Chicago. A new production opened this autumn at The Alley Theatre, Texas. Rachel has also co-adapted P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley, which has just completed a UK tour. In Autumn 2024, Rachel premiered two new plays, both written with Duncan Abel – Room 13, an original ghost play, at the Barn Theatre and a stage adaptation of Rebecca Netley’s The Whistling for the Mill at Sonning.  For radio, Rachel adapted Sebastian Faulks’ novel The Girl at the Lion d’Or as a five-part series for and, with Duncan Abel, wrote When I Lost You, both for Radio 4. Her theatre work is performed internationally, and she currently has multiple screen projects and new plays in development.

Philip Wilson

Philip’s work as an adaptor includes a new version of Cinderella (Chichester 2024, soon to be published by Nick Hern Books), Philip Pullman’s Grimm Tales (Shoreditch Town Hall and Oxo Tower Bargehouse; published by Nick Hern Books) and JL Carr’s A Month in the Country (Salisbury Playhouse). He has also adapted The Heyday by Bamber Gascoigne, The Other Alice by Michelle Harrison and The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan. He is the co-author, with Giles Taylor, of Dramatic Adventures in Rhetoric (Oberon Books). Philip is also a director, including at Chichester: If Love Were All, In Praise of Love (Minerva).