Brenda Ray was born in Derby, England, in 1944. She worked for some years as a librarian, where she spent time involved with the drama library and indulged in a good deal of people-watching, and had a play accepted for television in 1968, which was ultimately never screened. While bringing up a family, she wrote oddments for radio, including the infamous Vitas Gerulaitis poem, much favoured by Terry Wogan, and began writing for the theatre in 1978, after a successful local radio play for a youth theatre. Her first stage play, REHEARSAL, about the Spanish Civil War,was professionally produced at Derby Playhouse Studio Theatre in 1980, where it was directed by David Milne, and received good reviews. Having always had an interest in comedy(REHEARSAL was not without its share of laughs, in fact) she went on to write the Christmas Show for the Studio for the 1983/4 season, a Western with music, STICK'EM UP!, a fond parody of all those TV westerns of the 1950s and early 1960s with which she grew up. Her next play, DRESSING UP, about a group of women on a housing estate, was produced at Croydon Warehouse in 1985, and BUSTER; THE EARLY YEARS, a life story of Buster Keaton, told without words, was written for the Royal School for the Deaf in 1986 and produced again by another student group the following year at the Studio of the Unicorn Theatre for Children in London. In 1992 she decided to return to education and obtained a degree in Photographic Studies at the University of Derby in 1995. She then worked for a number of years as company librarian for a law firm and has now returned to writing as a writer of short fiction. Her first collection of stories, THE SIREN OF SALAMANCA, was published by Leaf Books in 2008 and another is in preparation. Her subjects cover many topics, but her main interest is the strange quirks of life and of human nature itself, for which both librarianship and the theatre have produced many rich pickings.Several of her short stories have won awards, including the Allianz Cornhill Short Story prize in 2005, for Siren of Salamanca, and most recently the 2nd prize in the HE Bates Short Story Competition 2011 for Gondwanaland.She also has an interest in the paranormal and several of her stories involving Spain and the Civil War may be based on a possible reincarnation experience. Or a vivid imagination - read the stuff and take your pick!
