Frederic Raphael

Screenwriter, novelist and journalist.

Frederic Raphael is an American-born, British-educated screenwriter, and also a prolific novelist and journalist. Raphael was educated at Charterhouse School and St John's College, Cambridge. In 1965, he won an Oscar for his screenplay for the film Darling, and two years later received a second Oscar nomination for his screenplay Two for the Road.

He has published more than twenty novels, the best-known of which is the semi-autobiographical The Glittering Prizes (1976), which traces the stories of a group of Cambridge University undergraduates in post-war Britain. The original six-part BBC television series, from which the book was adapted, won him a Royal Television Society Writer of the Year Award. Fame and Fortune, which continues the story to 1979, was adapted in 2007 and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

Raphael has published several history books, collections of essays and translations. He has also written biographies of Somerset Maugham and Lord Byron. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1964.