Roger Hall

Roger Hall was born in England in 1939 and emigrated to NZ in 1958.
He first worked for State Insurance, later working as a teacher and editor with the Education Dept before winning the Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago in 1977.
Hall’s earliest scripts were for television, but in 1976 he wrote his first stage play Glide Time (opened at Circa Theatre) which helped establish him as New Zealand’s best known and most commercially successful playwright. Many successful play productions followed including Middle Age Spread, By Degrees, Market Forces, C’Mon Black, Dirty Weekends, Social Climbers, The Book Club, You’ve Gotta Be Joking!, A Way of Life, Take a Chance on Me, Spreading Out and Taking Off together with musicals, pantomimes, radio dramas, books and plays for children and comedy series for television, most notably, Gliding On and Market Forces. His latest work, Who Wants to be a Hundred? opens in Auckland later this year.
His plays have been performed in ten other countries, the most successful being Middle Age Spread which ran in London’s West End for 15 months and won the award for Comedy of the Year.
Roger Hall was awarded a QSO and the Turnovsky Prize in 1987, the 1996 Katherine Mansfield Fellowship for study in Menton, and Hon Doctorate of Literature from Victoria University, 1996, and in 2003 he was made a Companion of the NZ Order of Merit (CNZM).

Pip Hall

Pip has worked as a full time writer since 1995, after graduating from the University of Otago with a degree in Drama.

She has written eight plays as well as co-written and devised half a dozen more. Pip is currently working on a CNZ funded project A Woman Who Loved A Mountain which was pitched at the Show & Tell for the International festival late last year. Since then, it has been picked up for a rehearsed reading at the Taranaki Festival and Michael Hurst is directing a production in Auckland 2008.

Pip is also collaborating with her father, Roger, on a commissioned work to celebrate the Plunket Centenary in 2007. Who Needs Sleep Anyway is premiering at the Fortune in Dunedin as part of the centenary celebrations. It later tours the South Island, while in July it opens at Downstage in Wellington.

Her one act play Shudder was published by The Play Press and is widely produced in high schools through out the country.

Pip also works extensively in television and film as a writer, story liner, story/script editor,actor and creative producer. Pip is married with two children and lives in Auckland.