Cooper, Giles

▪ British writer

in full  Giles Stannus Cooper  

born Aug. 9, 1918, Carrickmines, County Dublin, Ire.

died Dec. 2, 1966, London, Eng.

      one of the most original and prolific writers in Britain for the modern mass communications media.

      Educated at Lancing College near Brighton and in France, Cooper then studied at drama school and, after military service during World War II, was an actor for several years. In radio, for which he began writing in 1955, he found a medium ideally suited to his talents, and in such successful radio plays as “Mathry Beacon” (1956), “Under the Loofah Tree” (1958), and “Unman, Wittering and Zigo” (1958), he showed his ability to move easily from the world of fact to that of fantasy and to reveal the sinister motives underlying apparently normal action. His dismay at modern man's predicament was expressed hilariously in such television plays as “Before the Monday” and “The Long House” (1965), while the range of his talents was shown by “Loop” (1963) and “Carried by Storm” (1964), the first an experiment in science fiction and the second based on a wartime incident in the Iberian Peninsula in the early 19th century. As an adapter—of Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret stories, of Evelyn Waugh's wartime trilogy “Sword of Honour” (1967), and of Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables—he maintained a perfect harmony between text and medium.

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