Information highway^©

Hiawyn studied English and Drama in South Africa and worked as an advertising copywriter before becoming a full-time author. Since then, she’s had nearly 100 children’s books published in many languages across the world including picture books, poetry, plays, young fiction and story collections. The well-known TV series Mona the Vampire is based on her books with Sonia Holleyman. She’s also written the scripts and lyrics for two family musicals The Vackees and The Mermaid with music by Carl Davis.

Children’s TV includes development and scripts for the animated series, Sheep, Marvellous Milly, Wilf the Witch’s Dog and Big Cat, Little Cat. Her latest series of books, The Rumblewick Letters and Diaries, is about a cat with a witch called Haggy Aggy and a giant problem. All Haggy Aggy wants to do is shop, watch telly, wear pink, go to ballet school, start a girl band, become a celebrity chef and/or marry a handsome prince. And while she’s being anything and everything but a witch, who gets the blame? He does, of course, and all he can say is ‘Socks, socks, tadpoles in socks’ and ‘Why me?’

Prizes and awards include the Japanese Picture Book Award for Angry Arthur; the French Prix du Livre Interculturel for Just Like Us; the Experian Big 3 (6-8) for Just Dog; the UK Smarties shortlist for The Second Princess and the Red House shortlist for Mr Strongmouse and the Baby. Big Cat, Little Cat won the Tokyo Children’s Film Festival Award for Best Short Animated Film in 2002.

Hiawyn lives in London – without her now grown-up sons.

A list of work can be found here.

Hiawyn on writing the Sing Up Musical:

“I was so pleased to be asked to work on this show because, of all the things I do, writing musicals is my favourite. However, the theme ‘great inventions through history’ was challenging as it needed to be covered by only five songs. Where would I start?  With the wheel, obviously, but then ...? There have been so many ingenious inventions down the ages; how could I choose the next four to sing about? In the end my research gave me the solution. The more I looked into it, the more I found that almost none of the so-called ‘great inventors’ had worked alone. They’d stood on the shoulders of others before them. And that’s where the basic idea behind the musical came from, namely, a group of inventors, some famous and some not so famous, arguing amongst themselves about who did what and when and whose work has contributed most to the way we live. Having a group of 21st-century children help settle the argument seemed the natural conclusion!”

Simon Rogers is a British musician and composer, notable for his chart success both as a musician and as a producer as well as for his considerable portfolio of television soundtrack work.  In 1976, Simon entered the Royal College of Music, London, later becoming an associate (ARCM) and winning their guitar prize in 1980.  Upon leaving he joined Ballet Rambert’s Mercury Ensemble as their guitarist.  During this period he composed several ballet scores, including Entre Dos Aguas and Fabrications for London Contemporary Dance Theatre.  He also made his first commercial hit, joining the South American folk music group Incantation who enjoyed some UK and international chart success in the early 1980s, their best known single being Cacharpaya.  In 1985 Simon left both Rambert and Incantation and joined legendary post-punk group The Fall, initially as bassist, then subsequently on guitar and keyboards. He produced their top 20 album The Frenz Experiment (1988) before parting company with the group.  During this period, he also produced two albums for Bauhaus singer Peter Murphy.

He began to compose for television whilst at Rambert and his credits include TV dramas such as The Old Men at the Zoo (1982), Much Ado About Nothing (1983) and The Rainbow (1986) as well as two American TV movies, Daddy (1987) and The Preppy Murder (1989) for ABC.

In the 1990s Rogers continued to work in music production, beginning a long association with The Lightning Seeds, for whom he co-produced the albums Sense, Jollification, Dizzy Heights and Tilt as well as the football anthem Three Lions. He also returned to The Fall to produce the majority of their most successful album to date, The Infotainment Scan. Throughout the 1990s he was also involved with underground dance music, working on remixes under the names RAMP and Slacker, as well as several successful releases on Boy George's More Protein label, including Generations of Love and Everything Starts with an E. He has also developed solo projects such as Leuroj and T-Era for the Skint/Loaded labels, and Steiger for John Digweed’s Bedrock Records label.  Rogers has also signed a further project, Lautrec, to the Bustin’ Loose label, a project which has featuring vocals from Terry Hall and London MC Cantankerous.

In 2003, he returned to television music, scoring 40 (starring Eddie Izzard and Kerry Fox) for Channel 4. Work on other productions followed very swiftly after the first broadcast of the series including ITV's Rebus, starring Ken Stott, various episodes of BBC's Dalziel and Pascoe and Jon Howe's film Streets which was selected for the Venice Film Festival of 2004.

Recent credits include scores for South Africa, Murder Most Foul and Ochberg's Orphans directed by Oscar winning documentary maker Jon Blair and the title music for Hustle (Kudos/Spooks Ltd for BBC1) nominated for the Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music Emmy in 2007.

THE SING UP MUSICAL

Book and lyrics by Hiawyn Oram

Music by Kate Courage, Lin Marsh, Simon Rogers, Sarah Watts and Sheila Wilson

Title chosen by Rosemary Taylor-Mew and the Sing Up Club at St John’s CoE First and Middle School, Harrow.

The musical is all about the fantastic inventions that we use every day. Which gadget could you not live without? The phone? The computer? Paper? Take a journey with some great inventors as they visit a school and discuss the machines and mechanisms that have changed our world.

Audio information

The audio tracks were recorded specially for the Sing Up programme by Finchley Children's Music Group, mixed and mastered by Ron Knights. The backing track was specially created by Simon Rogers.

Copyright information

All copyright music in the Sing Up programme is used by permission. The songwriters and/or copyright holders have been remunerated under due licensing arrangements. Find out more about copyright by visiting the UK Music and Sound Rights websites.