A director at a Scottish independent TV production company is to soon celebrate the publication of his first novel.
Fire in the Head, by Les Wilson, is being launched a week next Tuesday.
The creative director of Caledonia TV – which he co-founded 18 years ago – has just completed directing a major BBC Scotland documentary, The Lighthouse Stevensons, for transmission early next year, and, next month, sets off for a month of filming in India and Australia to make a drama-documentary about Lachlan Macquarie, the early 19th century Governor of New South Wales who is often credited as being ‘The Father of Australia’.
He told allmediascotland: “I love the collaborative nature of running a production company and making documentaries, but I’m increasing also drawn to the solitary world of writing fiction. Both are exciting ways to scratch the creative itch. I first planned to be a writer when I was at school, but got seduced along the way into journalism and then television. They’ve been rewarding and often exciting careers, but now I find myself writing fiction that allows me to reflect on the events and issues that I’ve previously explored in factual programmes. And of course, I never have to let the facts interfere with a good story.”
A second novel is now planned.
Fire in the Head is the fictional tale of Campbell Aaronson, once a nuclear bomb scientistic now a pacifist music composer living in a remote community on the west coast of Scotland. His past is discovered by a journalist who gets more and more drawn into the community as it prepares to resist the scheme of a tycoon to turn the community’s remote home into a vast superquarry. But for the journalist nothing is quite what it seems, and he quickly becomes physically and emotionally embroiled in love, betrayal, deception and murder. The conflicting demands of modern capitalism and the need to care for the environment are fought out in a trial of strength that leads to tragedy.
