Amy Raphael Biography and latest books by Amy Raphael

Amy Raphael was born in London in 1967 and currently lives in Brighton. She worked as Features Editor on The Face and Elle in the early 90s and as Editor at Large on Esquire in the mid-90s. She has also freelanced with NME, Spin and the Evening Standard and now writes for The Guardian, The Observer and The Times. Her first book, Never Mind the Bollocks: Women Rewrite Rock, was published by Virago in 1995. She conducted the conversations and edited Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, which was published by Faber & Faber in 2008. She has also contributed to the The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock and Perfect Pitch, a series of books about football.

Danny Boyle In His Own Words

Danny Boyle\'s journey to Oscar night began in a Catholic working-class family in Lancashire in 1956. After a career in the theatre - working for esteemed companies as Joint Stock and the Royal Court - Boyle talked himself into a job at the BBC. Here he produced Alan Clarke\'s Elephant and directed the critically acclaimed mini-series Mr Wroe\'s Virgins. Then came films like - A Life Less Ordinary, The Beach, 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Slumdog Millionaire, which announced the arrival of a leading director for whom the collaboration between director, producer and writer was of the essence. The Danny Boyle who emerges from these interviews is frank, funny, charming and wholeheartedly motivating.

Mike Leigh On Mike Leigh

An insightful collection of original interviews with the innovative director of Secrets & Lies, a five-time Oscar nominee and BAFTA winner and the only British director to have won the top prize at both Cannes and Venice, Mike Leigh is unquestionably one of world cinema’s celebrated filmmakers. First trained in theater, Leigh devised his own method for the making of plays and films. Leigh’s actors invent characters based on real people, each unaware of what the other is up to or the larger design Leigh has envisioned.

Leigh’s films re-create the tragicomic world of people whose everyday lives are far from glamorous: a world in which is contrary to people’s inner hopes, wants, or needs. Leigh’s work has always reflected its times and entered the vernacular, whether the harsh studies of Meantime and Naked or the humor of the now legendary Abigail’s Party and Nuts in May. Above all, Leigh is an proficient storyteller, and these films deal with timeless themes: births, marriages, deaths, parenthood and failed relationships, families and their secrets and lies. Leigh speaks to Amy Raphael more openly than ever before about his life and inimitable style of working, revealing himself as a passionate and wise filmmaker.

Never Mind the Bollocks

This book is structured around interviews with female rockers of the early 1990s. These reports create a dynamic sense of what it was to be involved in this movement (both culturally and socially), from a uniquely female perspective.

Whether it be in conversation with Courtney Love or Echobelly, the author gets to the essence of her subject, determining not only what made each artist enter the male-dominated world of rock, but also what enables them to survive in the field.