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 About
Amy McGrath has
had a very versatile career as an author – writing poetry,
plays, musicals, epic novels and books on electoral
politics and certain proteins and sugars in food.
Amy McGrath was
attracted to the art of poetry by friends at university,
then set out to learn the craft by writing eighty sonnets.
Tempted into writing burlesque comic TV scripts for eminent
actor, John Bluthal, in early television, she acquired a
taste for play writing which brought her into an association
with the theatre at a time when drama was undergoing a
revolution in the way plays were being staged.
A live-in seminar
at the University of New England, organised by the
Elizabethan Theatre Trust, led her to found two showcase
theatres for new dramatic work. One was the
Mews Theatre, seating 60, for play readings in an old
coach house in the family backyard in Centennial Park,
Sydney. The other was the Australian Theatre, seating
160, in Coronation Hall, Lennox St. Newtown, for public
performance. In the 1970’s the Australian Theatre provided
flexible staging where many newcomers – actors, directors
and writers – could develop their skills including Amy
McGrath.
Seven of her own
plays, including two musicals – Eldorado and
Crusade - were performed or read in these
theatres. The first musical was about Sir Walter Raleigh and
the second about the Childrens’ Crusade
1212. The Daily Telegraph opera critic, Maria
Prerauer, described its 1975 Opera House performance as
‘the best since Super Star.’ A much longer modernised
version is to be staged by the St. Andrews Cathedral
School, Sydney in 2009.
She has written
three epic ‘faction’ novels. Her first, Kublai Khan
about the Genghis Khan Empire, briefly outsold Fay
Weldon and Robert Ludlum in the 1980’s. Her second,
Opium Lords, about the first Opium War in China
1834, did well in Hong Kong in the 1990’s. Her third novel,
Satan’s Kingdom, weaves the lives and loves of
migrants driven from France, and Ireland by the 1790’s
revolutions through the hardships of early Sydney, until
the second revolution of the NSW Corps in 1808 against the
Governor.
She also wrote
One Man’s Poison on maltose/glucose intolerance
which was featured on Good Morning Britain and the 7.30
Report of the Australian Broadcasting Commission plus a
sequel on sugars
One Man’s Bread, and 4 much-acclaimed books of
fraud, forgery and irregularities in elections.
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