Moffi Media

Moffi Media

I was born in Yorke, Westmoreland, Jamaica in 1954 and came to England in 1962. I attended Croft Street Junior School, Wheway Secondary School and Walsall Technical College. At school I was known for my athletic prowess and was pushed down this avenue and discouraged from engaging in any academic or intellectual pursuits. However on being taken to Birmingham Art Gallery by a student Art teacher at Wheway I discovered a love for the Arts. I began to draw and paint and subsequently enrolled at Walsall Technical College. There I discovered the library and a love for literature. My only ambition from then on was to become a writer. Within a year I left the college totally disillusioned with the pedagogy. I learned to play the guitar and began writing and performing songs and poetry. However, it wasn’t until I was 30, after the early death of my father, that I gained some success with my stage play Mamma Decemba that won the Samuel Beckett Award. That was immediately followed by Lifetime, a radio play, that won the Giles Cooper award, and When Love Dies for Channel 4, regaled as a ‘masterpiece’ by The Listener. At the same time I was invited to London by Paul Weller to record my song Peace, Love & Harmony, on which he played the keyboard, for his compilation CD Love The Reason. I was also by then doing some TV appearances. This was followed by invitations to work for the National Theatre, the Royal Court Theatre, Leicester Haymarket, Bristol Express, BBC Television, British Film Institute and the Birmingham Rep who recently produced my stage play Musical Youth. After this brief existence in the mainstream, and finding difficulty getting my work produced in a fashion that was artistically satisfying, I began doing work in the community. I won the Butler Trust Award for my work at Shrewsbury Prison where I was Writer-in-Residence for two years through a scheme run by the Arts Council of England. I later helped to set up a writing group at Castle Vale Radio. This was followed by the Black Writers In Walsall Group, Demo Recording project, and MultiCultural, a magazine I set up and coordinated, then the Drum Writers at The Drum in Birmingham in 2008. Wrote a novel When We Were Young in 2010. Wrote Another novel, Giro City, in 2011. Currently working on a series of short films to turn into a feature film entitled Short Trousers.