Jack Thorne has moved between intimate stage drama, television about working-class life and adaptations with audiences around the world. His writing ranges from The Solid Life of Sugar Water, made with Graeae Theatre Company, to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the play he wrote with J. K. Rowling and director John Tiffany. Alongside those very different projects, Thorne has pressed the British television industry to improve how it represents disabled people and includes disabled talent in its work.

Bristol, Cambridge and a change in direction

Thorne was born in Bristol on 6 December 1978. He attended St Bartholomew’s School in Newbury, Berkshire, before studying politics at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Ill health interrupted his studies in his third year; he later returned and graduated in 2002. At the age of 20, he developed cholinergic urticaria, a condition that made him allergic to heat, including his own body heat, and caused chronic pain. He has described the effects as severe enough to leave him spending much of his early twenties in bed.

His encounter with Graeae Theatre Company, which works with disabled artists, helped him think differently about disability and his place in the arts. Thorne described attending one of the company’s open days as a “coming out moment”. That connection would become a substantial part of his professional life: he wrote for Graeae and later became a patron of the company. His experience informs the context of this work, but his writing about disability also draws on stories and campaigners beyond his own life.

Writing for the stage

Thorne’s early plays included Fanny and Faggot, When You Cure Me and Stacy. Bunny won a Fringe First at the Edinburgh Festival in 2010. He continued to write for British theatres, including Hope for the Royal Court and adaptations such as Let the Right One In, staged by the National Theatre of Scotland before reaching London and New York. His work has also taken in new versions of classic texts: he adapted Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists for the Donmar Warehouse and wrote an adaptation of A Christmas Carol for the Old Vic, which returned to the theatre in later Christmas seasons.

The Solid Life of Sugar Water premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2015, produced by Graeae Theatre Company and Theatre Royal Plymouth, and went on to tour and play at the National Theatre. The play follows a couple dealing with grief and the strain of trying to remain connected. Its production brought together Thorne’s stage writing and his relationship with Graeae, while making disability part of the theatrical conversation rather than a subject at a distance.

His best-known stage work, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, opened at London’s Palace Theatre in 2016. Thorne wrote the play from an original story developed with Rowling and Tiffany. It later opened on Broadway and in other cities. The production won the Olivier Award for Best New Play and the Tony Award for Best Play. The scale of that success sits alongside a theatre career that has also included smaller, contemporary dramas and adaptations.

Television, film and radio

For television, Thorne has written across genres and formats. He worked with director Shane Meadows on the connected series This Is England ’86, This Is England ’88 and This Is England ’90, extending the world of Meadows’s film into a longer account of its characters and their lives. The collaboration continued with The Virtues. Other television dramas include The Fades, Glue and National Treasure; Thorne won BAFTA awards for The Fades, This Is England ’88, Don’t Take My Baby, This Is England ’90 and National Treasure.

His television writing has also included stories centred on disability and care. Don’t Take My Baby follows a young disabled couple confronting the possibility that they may lose custody of their child. Help, set and filmed in Liverpool during the COVID-19 pandemic, focuses on disabled people and their carers. In 2022, Thorne co-wrote Then Barbara Met Alan with Genevieve Barr. The drama tells the story of disabled campaigners Barbara Lisicki and Alan Holdsworth, whose activism helped bring the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 into being.

Thorne has written for film as well as television. His first feature, The Scouting Book for Boys, won him the London Film Festival’s Best British Newcomer award in 2009. Later credits include A Long Way Down, War Book, Wonder, The Aeronauts, Radioactive, The Secret Garden and the Enola Holmes films. He co-wrote The Swimmers, about two sisters fleeing war-torn Syria, and Joy, which tells the story of three British scientists and their work to develop IVF. His radio plays include People Snogging in Public Places, which won a Sony Radio Academy Award for Best Drama in 2010.

Making television more accessible

Thorne has argued that television can help audiences imagine lives beyond their own, but that this potential is weakened when disabled people are poorly represented or excluded from the industry. In his 2021 MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival, he criticised the way television covered disabled people during the pandemic and called for change both on screen and behind the camera.

With Genevieve Barr and Katie Player, he announced Underlying Health Condition, a pressure group intended to elevate disabled voices in the television industry. Launched at Tate Modern in December 2021, it worked with disability organisations to set out practical measures for supporting disabled artists. This work contributed to the TV Access Project, in which ten major UK broadcasters and streaming services committed to full inclusion of Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent talent by 2030. The project developed its “5As” guidance: Anticipate, Ask, Assess, Adjust and Advocate.

Its early work included training commissioning editors and senior leaders, supporting early-career disabled talent, and pursuing better access provision for freelance workers. In 2024, the project’s ten members announced plans to boycott studios and production spaces that had not completed an accessibility audit by August 2025. Thorne’s advocacy therefore extends beyond asking television to tell different stories: it addresses the working conditions and access arrangements that determine who can make them.

Why Jack Thorne deserves a place in British Legacy

Thorne’s place in British Legacy rests on a body of work that connects British theatre and television with audiences at home and abroad. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child brought a new play to London’s West End before reaching Broadway and other international stages. Alongside that major production, his writing for The Solid Life of Sugar Water, This Is England and National Treasure shows a sustained engagement with different kinds of contemporary life and with the institutions through which stories reach the public. His awards recognise work across stage and screen, but the range of his projects is as telling as the prizes: he has written original drama, adaptations, radio plays and screenplays.

His contribution also includes practical efforts to widen participation in British television. Thorne has drawn attention to the under-representation of disabled people, helped establish Underlying Health Condition and supported the development of the TV Access Project. Its guidance and commitments address access in hiring, production and working environments, not only the images audiences see. That work matters because a more accessible industry can enable more disabled people to contribute as writers, performers and crew, and allow a wider range of experiences to shape what television makes. Thorne’s legacy is therefore both creative and institutional: a substantial record of storytelling, paired with advocacy aimed at changing who gets to tell stories and how they are made.

Sources

Jack Thorne — Wikipedia revision 1379342493

Adapted in part from Jack Thorne by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.