In 2015, O'Hagan published his fifth novel The Illuminations: A Novel, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. [15] Andrew has been the most generous and brilliant collaborator. He’s an Executive Producer and has been closely involved throughout the script process, through the shoot and into post production. He completely understands the need to make some changes to suit the televisual form and gave us his blessing. His insights into his story, characters and their relationships has been invaluable and I’ll be eternally grateful to him - not just for the gift of his book but for his creative genius. How did Synchronicity Films come to the project and how did you get involved as Executive Producer? It is exactly that,” O’Hagan says, “and I have never taken it for granted. The most dramatic ways out of childhoods like mine were boxing, a pools win, or making it in a band. My grandfather was a boxer, who died at 34. For our generation the most reliable was music. We could watch all those brilliant scallies like, say, Echo and the Bunnymen, become genuine heroes, creative, political, articulate. They showed us that it could be done.” As an Executive Producer, I took a great interest in the production. Finding the right actors to play these boys was a crucial task from the beginning. We looked at a lot of very talented people but the ones we found seemed to burst with energy and understanding. Casting is a tough game and it keeps you up at night!

O'Hagan was born in Glasgow city centre in 1968, [1] [2] of Irish Catholic descent, and grew up in Kilwinning, North Ayrshire. [3] His mother was a school cleaner, his father worked as a joiner in Paisley, and he had four elder brothers. [1] His father was a violent alcoholic, and as a boy, he would hide books from his father under his bed. [4] In 1991, O'Hagan joined the staff of the London Review of Books, where he worked for four years. [5] a b O'Hagan, Andrew (6 March 2014). "Ghosting". London Review of Books. 36 (5): 5–26 . Retrieved 12 April 2019. Flood, Alison (1 December 2008). "Scottish book of the year goes to Kieron Smith, Boy". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 13 November 2011. Mayflies is both a coming-of-age story and a meditation on life-long male friendship, assisted dying and what it means to take control and live the lives we truly want to. It is nostalgic, poignant and moving and honestly depicts the bonds and boundaries of a shared life and values.I got cast... these things are never overly complicated. Bizarrely, when it came through to me from my agent, I was in a field in Budapest at an Arctic Monkeys gig. It was 1am and I thought I was tripping! Tony Curran, who plays Tully, has been one of my best pals for years so seeing his name already attached was exciting because I love working with pals. I mentioned the project to the journalist I was with, as I was doing a feature for the Big Issue, and his face lit up - Mayflies feels like a really well-loved book, especially by writers. I read the script and loved it. His most recent novel as of 2021 [update] is Mayflies (2020), which won the Christopher Isherwood Prize. a b Nakamoto, Andrew O’Hagan on the many lives of Satoshi (30 June 2016). "The Satoshi Affair". London Review of Books. 38 (13): 7–28. When I first read the script they didn’t tell me they’d have different actors playing the younger characters. I thought for a second I was playing the younger Jimmy as well…it was heart-breaking when I realised that wasn’t the case. Ha! Rian is a great lad and the whole young team were brilliant. It was really reassuring because in the section where I play Jimmy, there’s a lot of emotional stuff. It’s very intense and you can feel like you’re in a dark tunnel. But the young team hanging out and hitting it off brought another side to it with moments of joy and light. Rian and Tom, who plays young Tully, were on top form. It can be scary to hand something over to another actor but their commitment was phenomenal. They’d send videos of them all on nights out, being young lads, which was brilliant to see.

A timely corrective to the idea that nothing profound can be said about now.' Will Self, Observer Books of the Year ANI (22 February 2014). "Ghostwriter calls Assange 'mercurial character who could not bear his own secrets' ". Business Standard. They’re incredibly close. What’s so amazing is that sometimes young people in film are portrayed as being involved in gangs and violence, but this group are obsessed with films, music, culture. They feel like an arty bunch, boys with broad minds, and I can relate to that as I grew up with films and music at the centre of my world. I couldn’t imagine anyone else playing Tully, I thought of Tony as soon as I read it. At one point, Jimmy calls Tully the life force and that is Tony. He’s the energizer bunny, great fun to be around, absolutely full of beans. He’s perfect casting.I read the book before it had been published and before it went out to the public and fell in love with it immediately. It’s been amazing, and perhaps a little daunting, to see how well it’s been received and how it’s been lauded as a profound and tender work. It’s both of those things but it’s also very funny and never sombre, even when it’s exploring the reality of our mortality. This is a book about life and death and everything in between. It’s a huge responsibility to adapt something so humane and I really hope I’ve done it justice. Andrea did an amazing job. I feel she really captured the tone, and essence of the source material. The script felt like it was an extension of the novel. Both writers have an amazingly powerful connection to this topic, but I’ll let them tell their own story. For now I’ll just say, I was blown away by the way it was depicted and the essence Andrea and Claire Mundell (executive producer) captured and have delivered with the help of an amazing director. Having read the manuscript, I was determined to try to option the novel. At Synchronicity we like to explore pertinent, contemporary issues through the lens of elevated drama. We also like to celebrate Scottish writers and writing and so this was the best combination of everything we love. I also knew that my good friend and collaborator, the wonderful screenwriter Andrea Gibb would be perfect to adapt this novel. That might seem counter intuitive (or even controversial!) given she's a woman and this is a story about male friendship, but Andrea has direct experience of nursing her late partner through a very similar situation, and I knew the combination of her personal experience and her incredible, emotionally rooted writing would nail the empathy and the sentiment needed for this piece. Mayflies is the story of a group of guys who grow up together in Ayrshire, about their love of music and politics in 1986, and what happens to them thirty years later. The early part of the drama centres around a famous concert they attended in Manchester, but many years later, they are forced to ask what friendship is all about, and how reliable are your old pals? That became the story for me. The tabloids were taking a typically frenzied and customarily pornographic interest in the killers' methods of disposal. But there was something beyond the story itself, a narrative made up of holes, absences, aporia, and failures to notice, in which the history of community in postwar Britain spoke for itself.

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil. I was once told ‘never believe them when they tell you your work is good and never believe them when they tell you it isn’t.’ In short, trust yourself, but you have to listen as well. It’s important to be open to ideas while remembering that no one has all the answers. It’s the people who ask the big questions that are always the most valuable in the screenwriting process. The beauty of working with producers as gifted as Claire is that she does. I think everyone can relate to what it means to confront your own mortality or the mortality of someone you love. That creates a universal access point to the story for the audience. Most people understand the appeal and the comfort of friendship, so that's another access point. Finally, we all know what it means to be younger and imagine how your life might pan out, to make plans for the future and to then have to confront a present day life that doesn't match what you envisaged. So, I think this show is incredibly relatable - no matter the age of the audience. Plus who doesn't love a bit of 80s nostalgia, music, culture and fashion! This starts out with a familial biography investigating his past in Glasgow and the disappearance (through drowning when his ship was torpedoed) of his grandfather. This particular incidence and expression of 'Missing' leads him into examining other 'missings' in his own personal past when the family had moved to the new Ayrshire coastal town of Irvine.This was O’Hagan’s first book and unlike his later fiction works is a piece of investigative reporting. Tully is 50 years old and he’s an English teacher who lives in a small town in Scotland with his wife Anna. Mayflies (2x60’) is a Synchronicity Films (The Cry) production for the BBC, co-commissioned with BBC Scotland, in association with All3Media International with support from Screen Scotland. Filming took place around Glasgow and Ayrshire. Andrew O'Hagan FRSL (born 1968) is a Scottish novelist and non-fiction author. Three of his novels have been nominated for the Booker Prize and he has won several awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Award. The Missing, part autobiography, part old-fashioned pavement-pounding, marks the most auspicious debut by a British writer for some time.' Gordon Burn, Independent