Tommy Donbavand
“A great concept, brilliantly executed. Sharp as a vampire’s fang and quick as a bat out of hell.” JOE CRAIG
Visit Tommy’s website here - www.tommydonbavand.com
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Tommy Donbavand was born and brought up in Liverpool, but supports Everton. When he was 9 years old his parents moved to Leyland in Lancashire and, because they didn’t trust him to forward their post, he had to go with them.
Throughout school, Tommy had a strong interest in drama and writing; he appeared in many amateur productions including The Winslow Boy, Our Town and The Card. At college, Tommy continued to train as a straight actor and began to write new shows for his fellow thespians to perform. All this serious acting paid off and, upon leaving college he immediately became a clown called Wobblebottom and toured the country entertaining children.
Tommy then took to the seas and performed on board Ukrainian cruise liners (he is still the only person he knows who can call bingo in Russian). After a few years, he was promoted to the role of Entertainments Manager and wrote even more shows for the passengers on board.
Back on dry land, Tommy joined the cast of the hit West End musical, Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story as the Clearlake MC, staying with the show for a total of eight years - including stints on the UK tour and Toronto productions. He’s still amazed the producers let him loose with a microphone in front of 1,000 people every night.
Shortly after the millennium, Tommy wrote four books of children’s activities and projects which were published by How To Books: Quick Fixes For Bored Kids, More Quick Fixes For Bored Kids, Quick Fixes For Kids’ Parties and Boredom Busters. He became a regular guest on radio shows across the UK, including BBC Radio 2’s Steve Wright In The Afternoon, as the ‘kids entertainment guy’.
When Buddy ended, Tommy moved to the north east of England to write and perform in shows for The Panto Company, including Hey Diddle Diddle, Rumplestiltskin and Humpty Dumpty And The Incredibly Daring Rescue Of The Alien Princess In Deep Space. He also became one of the writers for the Children’s BBC series, Planet Cook.
In 2006, the writing finally took over and Tommy set himself up as a full-time author, writing five titles in Egmont Books’ Too Ghoul For School series: Terror In Cubicle Four, Silent But Deadly, School Spooks Day, Attack Of The Zombie Nits and A Fete Worse Than Death. He was also proud to become the writer-in-residence at Seven Stories, the centre for children’s books in Newcastle.
Tommy signed the contract for Scream Street with Walker Books in 2007, and the series was quickly doubled from six books to 12. The first 4 titles - Fang of the Vampire, Blood of the Witch, Heart of the Mummy and Flesh of the Zombie - will be published in October 2008.
Tommy still lives in the north east with his family and is hard at work on more Scream Street stories, an educational book called Making A Drama Out Of A Crisis, a novel for struggling readers and a couple of projects that are so top secret that even he doesn’t have all the details. He has started to see sleep as a waste of good writing time…