Roy Apps


Roy Apps is a British screenwriter, dramatist and children’s author.
In 2001 Roy Apps was awarded a personal BAFTA for outstanding contributions to children’s film and television.
For 10 years he wrote for the award-winning CBBC series Byker Grove where his first job was to write out the show’s leading characters ‘PJ and Duncan’ played by Ant and Dec. He co-devised and wrote for the award-winning series The Ghost Hunter and has contributed to many other TV series, including Chucklevision, Barmy Aunt Boomerang, Stacey Stone and Casper's Scare School.
He has written over a hundred scripts for BBC radio, including Fungus the Bogeyman, which won a Sony Award. His most recent work includes The Master & Mrs Tucker, a play about the friendship between Noël Coward and E Nesbit and Life Begins at Crawley, a comedy drama featuring Penelope Keith. Both of these dramas were made for BBC Radio 4 by the award-winning independent production company Pier Productions.
He is the author of 78 children’s books. In 1991, his novel The Secret Summer of Daniel Lyons won the Writers’ Guild Children’s Book Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Awards. The Fang Gang series is published by Bloomsbury. Charlie - Prince Of Wheels is published by the Oxford University Press. His popular How to Handle... series has been relaunched as part of the Franklin Watts EDGE series. He has recently been commissioned to write four new titles for his sports series Dream to Win.
He regularly visits schools to help young writers create books, plays, films, poetry, musical theatre and opera. He has been Writer-in-Residence at The Museum of Canterbury, OperaHouse Music Projects, the Aspire Trust, the Palace Theatre, Westcliff-on-Sea and The National Gallery, London. He is Patron Of Reading at two schools: Oakley School, Tunbridge Wells and Paddington Academy, West London.
Apps and his wife have two sons and live near Rye in Sussex.