Cirrus@Austlit

Alan Seymour is best known in Australia for his play The One Day of the Year that explored the way ANZAC Day is commemorated. First produced in 1961, the play ignited passionate debate. The play was also produced in London, England, in 1961 and Seymour attended the production. He was away from Australia for the next three decades writing plays, screenplays, television scripts and adapting novels for film and television.

Seymour was educated in Perth, Western Australia, at Perth Modern School. After failing the Junior Certificate examination at fifteen, he left school and worked as an announcer, copy-writer and freelance writer and film critic for various commercial radio stations in Perth and in Sydney as well as for ABC radio and later television. While working for the Perth commercial radio station 6PM in the early 1940s, he wrote short radio plays which were broadcast live. From 1953 to 1957 he was theatrical director for the Sydney Opera Group. His first play, Swamp Creatures, premiered by the Canberra Repertory Society, was a finalist in the London Observer play competition in 1957.

From the 1960s Seymour worked in London for the BBC and was the theatre critic for the London Magazine, 1963 to 1965. From 1966 to 1971 Seymour lived in Turkey where he continued to write stage plays as well as novels and magazine articles. From 1974 he was a script editor and occasional producer with the BBC returning to freelance writing in 1981. 'Eustace and Hilda', dramatised by Seymour from the trilogy by L.P. Hartley, won a Royal TV Society Special Creativity Award in1979 and 'Box of Delights' (BBC TV, 1984), dramatised by Seymour from the novel by John Masefield, won a BAFTA Award in 1984. Seymour returned to live in Australia in January 1995.

Alan Seymour was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Western Australia in April 2002. He is the uncle of Clem Gorman.

Source: National Library of Australia, 'Finding Aid', Papers of Alan Seymour (1927- ), MS 9198.