Michael Eaton

Judge for RAI Film Award & Basil Wright Film Award

Michael Eaton is a dramatist working across cinema, television, radio, and theatre. A double first-class graduate in Social Anthropology from King’s College, Cambridge, he wrote acclaimed TV docudramas including Why Lockerbie, Shoot to Kill (BAFTA-nominated), and Shipman. His script for the feature film Fellow Traveller won Best Screenplay at the 1989 British Film Awards. For Nottingham Playhouse, he wrote Charlie Peace and others. He adapted Dickens for BBC Radio 4 and wrote original radio plays on topics from Churchill to the Northern Ireland peace process. In 2010 he visited the Torres Strait island of Mer, site of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition led by Alfred Haddon and made a documentary film The Masks of Mer about the first ethnographic films Haddon shot there. He was awarded the M.B.E. for Services to Film in the 1999 New Year’s honours and was a Visiting Professor in the School of Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. He received a Doctorate of Letters from NTU in 2021 and is currently Adjunct Professor at the School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland, Brisbane.