Troy – Andrew Rissik

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About Troy: the acclaimed BBC Radio 3 trilogy

“Easily the radio drama event of the year… a triumph. No one could have wanted this compulsive, gripping epic a second shorter… stupendous… a Trojan War for our time.”
Ken Garner, The Express On Sunday

“Irresistible. A magnificent marriage of the epic and demotic. Is there anywhere else in the world that this kind of work can be found? Radio 3: trail this, promote it, cherish it, and above all repeat it.”
Anne Karpf, The Guardian

This play is now also available on Amazon Audible with its original cast at https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Myths-Reimagined-Troy-Trilogy-Dionysos-More-Audiobook/1529143772.

Author biography

Andrew Rissik is a British scriptwriter, arts journalist and critic best known for the BBC Radio 3 trilogy, Troy and the five-part thriller serial for Radio 4, The Psychedelic Spy.

He was born in 1955, educated at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford, where he took a Double First in English in 1977. After a short period as a junior academic, he moved to London in 1979, where he taught part time, worked as a script reader for the BBC and contributed to many newspapers and magazines, including Time Out, The New Statesman and The Times.

In 1983 he published a book on the films of Sean Connery, The James Bond Man. He was theatre critic at The Independent from 1986 to 1988, and from 1999 to 2001 a lead book reviewer for The Guardian. His full time writing and journalistic career came to an end in 1988 when he was diagnosed with M.E., from which he still suffers.

Most of his dramatic work has been done for BBC Radio Drama, although a tv play was broadcast by Thames in 1981. Blue Pacific Island (Radio 4 1985) was followed by the trilogy A Man Alone in 1986 (the first part of which won a Giles Cooper Award), and by a five-part thriller The Psychedelic Spy in 1990. King Priam, a one-hour account of the Trojan war starring Paul Scofield, was broadcast in 1987 and led to a four-and-a-half-hour, three-play development of the subject, Troy, which won wide acclaim a decade later on BBC Radio 3 in 1998.

A further thematically-linked three-play sequence – Dionysos, The Art of Love and Resurrection – was broadcast by Radio 3 at Easter in 2004.

Reviews

From readers’ comments on Amazon:

“Utterly brilliant – classical, messed-up family psychodrama, epic Greek mythical backdrop – what’s not to love? Mr Rissik is a genius, love his writing. Highly recommended.”

“One of the best Radio Dramas I have ever heard… hugely talented.”