Andrew Rissik

Andrew Rissik (born 23 April 1955) is a British scriptwriter, journalist and critic best known for the BBC Radio 3 trilogy, Troy and the five-part thriller serial for Radio 4, The Psychedelic Spy. He was theatre critic at The Independent from 1986 to 1988, and a book reviewer for The Guardian from 1999 to 2001. His full-time writing and journalistic career came to an end in early 1988 when he was diagnosed with Myalgic encephalomyelitis (M.E.), from which he still suffers.

The son of a company lawyer, Rissik grew up in Buckinghamshire and was educated at St George's School, Windsor (where his contemporaries included the counter tenor Michael Chance and the composer Francis Grier), Harrow School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated with a Congratulatory First in English in 1977. He was elected to a junior academic position at Christ Church in 1978, but left a year later to pursue a career in drama and journalism. His student theatre experience was mostly in comedy. It included directing one of Rowan Atkinson's first appearances on the Oxford stage in a 1976 show, After Eights, partly written by Richard Curtis (whom he first met at Harrow); also a revue in 1978 for the Oxford Theatre Group on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe which again featured Richard Curtis, as well as Angus Deayton, Phil Pope, Tim McInnerny and Helen Atkinson-Wood.

In London in the early 1980s he taught part-time, worked as a script reader for the BBC and contributed arts criticism to many newspapers and magazines, including Harpers and Queen, Time Out, Plays and Players, the New Statesman and The Times. In 1986 he joined the founding team of The Independent as theatre and radio critic.

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