Iain Joseph Robert Landles is an English playwright who writes mainly avant garde and experimental plays. His work has been seen on the London fringe, Edinburgh, the Brighton Festival, and on numerous tours across the UK.
Landles was born in Portsmouth, England, the eldest son of John and Pauline Landles. His early childhood was spent between England and Malta and his first language is Maltese. Landles obtained a First at Portsmouth University, where he also gained an MA in Literature, and received his Doctorate at Sussex University. He has been writing plays since 1988 and his first show (Urak-Hai) took place in 1992. Since then his work has appeared on the London Fringe, the Edinburgh and Brighton Festivals, and on numerous tours across Britain.
Landles' War Trilogy [1] was performed between 2003 and 2005 at the White Bear Theatre, London. Time Out said of The Siege: "Landles' fierce poetic style, together with his themes of political and sexual depravity, might make you think of Howard Barker, and you'd not be far wrong. ... Landles has served up an intriguingly nasty piece of work."[2] Landles is a controversial playwright, experimenting with theatrical form (see Seventh Day Respite, 2007, and Accelerating Expansion, 2008), language, character, and narrative. His confrontational style of writing has made him few friends in the theatrical world, and his unique voice is known for its lack of compromise. Seventh Day Respite received its premiere on 6 September 2011, at the White Bear Theatre, London.
Landles gained a Doctorate from the University of Sussex and has published extensively on the poet E.E. Cummings, for example, The Case for Cummings [3] and is also a Contributing and Consulting editor for SPRING, The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society.[4] He finished his first novel KK: A Death in January 2009, and has completed 1920: Variations on a Theme of Masculinity which was published by Black Opal Books in August, 2017. He is currently working on a new play.
Iain Landles is married to Joanna and lives in Oxford, England.