Leo Aylen has had nine books of his poetry published: Discontinued Design (Venture Press) I, Odysseus; Sunflower (which went into 4th imprint); Return to Zululand (which went into 6th imprint); Red Alert; this is a god warning; Jumping-Shoes; (all by Sidgwick an Jackson) Rhymoceros (for children) (Macmillan); Dancing the Impossible, new & selected poems (Salzburg); The Day The Grass Came (Muswell Press). He is also published in approximately 100 anthologies, many for children.
He has written two books on the theatre of the fifth century BC: Greek Tragedy and the Modern World (Methuen) & The Greek Theater (Associated Universities Press), as well as a travellers’ history of Greece Greece for Everyone (Sidgwick and Jackson)
He has had three solo programs on CBS Nationwide TV, has performed his one-person poetry one-person show in the Royal Albert Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room, St John’s Smith Square, Round House, St Paul’e Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, in festivals, theatres, universities, schools, in Britain, North America, & Africa. His work has been performed in Scandinavia, Germany, and Hong Kong. He has also appeared in hospitals, prisons, fairgrounds, and New York night clubs, , He has performed his show round the Black theatres of South Africa during Apartheid and to 4000 Zulus in an open-air amphitheatre.
He was contracted by the BBC to write the film Soul of a Nation, on the life and work of King Bhumibhol of Thailand, including a specially written poem on the King, spoken by Sir John Gielgud.
He created and directed a dance drama on human life based on Lorca’s poetry, the central feature in a BBC 2 series called Six Bites of the Cherry presenting human life in poetry and song.
Awarded BAFTA Nomination for The Drinking Party, an adaptation of Plato’s Symposium as a film for BBC, he has made fifteen films for BBC & ITV. He has co-written the Hollywood Blockbuster Gods and Generals on the American Civil War, starring Robert Duvall (Warner Bros 2003). He was contracted to write a film with a Native American cast on a Haida story from the Pacific North-west of America, but funding did not materialise.
He has worked as a writer & director in British theatre, writing lyrics for the cockney musical Down the Arches, and directed his version of Sophocles’s Antigone with full singing & dancing chorus for a sell-out run. He has performed some of his poetry shows with distinguished actors, Prunella Scales, Ruth Madoc, Sara Kestelman, Stephanie Cole.
For BBC Radio he has translated poetry from Greek, Latin, Italian, French, German, and Spanish, and created poetry features on Jacques Brel & Johann Sebastian Bach.
For over five years he was contracted to create poems about current news stories for Radio 4, including reacting to Tony Blair’s first speech as Prime Minister, the sinking of the Marchioness pleasure cruiser, and the moment Dylan Thomas’s wife Caitlin was placed in her grave.
He has also formed an interlude in a beauty competition and instigated a limerick competition for double-glazing salesmen at the Lambeth Country Fair