Peter Harness Biography

Peter Harness (born 1976) is an English playwright, screenwriter and actor. He grew up in Hornsea, East Yorkshire and attended Oriel College, Oxford where he studied English and graduated with a first. He is a former president of the Oxford Revue. He was one of Screen International's Stars of Tomorrow, 2007 and is a recipient of the Dennis Potter Screenwriting Award. He lives in Malmö, Sweden.

Career

Mongoose, his first original stage play, was performed at the Southwark Playhouse in 2003 (directed by Thea Sharrock) and later at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh and the Trafalgar Studios, London. The text is published by Nick Hern Books.

In 2005, he adapted the M.R. James short story "A View From A Hill" for BBC4. It was the first in a new annual series of BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas. Harness went on to write several other single films for BBC4, including a biopic of Frankie Howerd, Rather You Than Me, starring David Walliams and Rafe Spall, which was part of the Curse of Comedy season, as well as the Spanish Flu drama, The Forgotten Fallen, starring Bill Paterson, Mark Gatiss and Charlotte Riley, which dealt with the efforts of a medical team in Manchester to combat the disease in 1918.

Harness was the writer of the third series of the BBC's Wallander, starring Kenneth Branagh. This comprised three films: The Dogs of Riga, Before the Frost, and a new story developed by Henning Mankell and Harness called An Event in Autumn.

Aside from Wallander, Harness has worked on several other successful series. City of Vice, starring Ian McDiarmid and Iain Glen, was shown on Channel Four to critical acclaim. Harness (along with co-writer Clive Bradley) was nominated for a Writers Guild of Great Britain Award for Best Series. In 2011, he adapted Kate Atkinson's novel When Will There Be Good News? as part of the BBC1 series Case Histories, starring Jason Isaacs as private detective Jackson Brodie. Harness's episodes of the series won a Scottish BAFTA for Best Television Drama, 2011. Harness also adapted the fourth Jackson Brodie book, Started Early, Took My Dog for the second series of Case Histories, which filmed in Summer, 2012.

His first original screenplay, Is Anybody There? was filmed by award-winning Irish director John Crowley in 2007. The movie, set in an old people's home, starred Michael Caine, David Morrissey, Anne-Marie Duff and Bill Milner. It was premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, 2008, and released theatrically across Europe and the US in 2009. Harness was nominated for a Writers Guild Award for the film.

He has also been active in the Malmö theatre community as part of the theatre group Teater Insite both as an actor and a writer.

In November 2012 it was announced that he would adapt Susanna Clarke's novel Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell into a six-part drama series for the BBC.