Sally Wainwright

Sally Wainwright
Born	Sally A Wainwright 1963 Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England
Nationality	British
Education	University of York
Occupation	Television writer Playwright
Years active	2000-present
Known for	Last Tango in Halifax Happy Valley Scott & Bailey
Spouse(s)	Austin Sherlaw-Johnson
Children	2

Sally A Wainwright (born 1963) is an English television writer and playwright. She won the 2009 Writer of the Year Award given by the RTS in 2009 for Unforgiven. She is known for work on the BBC dramas Happy Valley and Last Tango in Halifax. Both have won BAFTA's award for best series, and Wainwright was voted best writer.

Wainwright was born in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, to Harry Wainwright and Dorothy Wainwright (née Crowther). Wainwright was brought up in Sowerby Bridge where she attended Triangle C of E Primary School and Sowerby Bridge Grammar School. She attended the University of York, reading English and Related Literature. She has an older sister Diane Hilton, a housing professional with The Guinness Partnership.

Wainwright said that she had always wanted to write, and had started writing when she was young, from the time she was 9 years old, and wanted to write for Coronation Street. She said that when she was 16 years old in 1980 she saw a play called Bastard Angel by playwright Barrie Keeffe at Royal Shakespeare Company and was deeply interested in the short sentences and naturalistic approach to dialogue.

While at University of York, Wainwright took an original play called Hanging On to the Edinburgh Festival and found an agent, Meg Davis, for her writing in the process. Meanwhile, she worked as a bus driver.

When she was 24, she left the driving job after she started writing for the Radio 4 series The Archers. One of her contributions was to write an atypical story for the long running radio soap in which the village shop was robbed. After that she wrote for Coronation Street, developing her writing skills, from 1994 to 1999. She has since said that working on continuing drama was a great education in discipline and a lesson that great stories are hard work. She was mentored by Kay Mellor who encouraged her to stop writing for soaps and to concentrate instead on original work. She created the TV series At Home with the Braithwaites about a woman who had secretly won the lottery. The programme was nominated for many awards. She won the 2009 Writer of the Year Award given by the RTS in 2009 for Unforgiven which took several awards including best TV series.

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