Early in his career, Read wrote a number of scripts for film and television –
A Premeditated Crime (1967) for the German director
Peter Lilienthal whom he met in Berlin;
Coincidence (1968),
The House on Highbury Hill (1971) and
The Childhood Friend (1974) as
Wednesday Plays for BBC television – the latter starring Anthony Hopkins who would also play the title role in the television adaptation of Read's
A Married Man (1984). A short play
The Class War was staged by the Questors Theatre Company in 1964, and his
Margaret Clitherow was broadcast by Granada Television in 1977. The greater part of Read's work has been in prose form. After his plotless first novel,
Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx (1967), Read's fiction adopted a more traditional narrative structure with both contemporary and historical settings. Three of his historical novels –
The Junkers (1968),
Polonaise (1976),
The Free Frenchman (1986), are set in Continental Europe around World War II; and
Alice in Exile (2001) in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. Read's contemporaneous novels –
A Married Man (1979),
A Season in the West (1988), and
The Misogynist (2010) – are ironic critiques of the manners and morals of the English upper-middle classes. There are elements of the thriller in
The Villa Golitsyn (1981),
On the Third Day (1990),
A Patriot in Berlin (1995),
Knights of the Cross (1997) and
The Death of a Pope (2009), though these too show Read's historical, political and religious concerns. With
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors (1974),
The Train Robbers (1978), and
Ablaze: The Story of Chernobyl (1993) Read extended his range to reportage; to history with
The Templars (1999) and
The Dreyfus Affair (2012); and to biography with
Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography (2003). He has also contributed to moral and religious controversies with a pamphlet
Quo Vadis: The Subversion of the Catholic Church (1991), and essays and articles collected in
Hell and Other Destinations (2006). Read was awarded the Sir Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for
The Junkers; the Hawthornden Prize and Somerset Maugham Award for
Monk Dawson; the Thomas More Medal for
Alive; the Enid McLeod Award for
The Free Frenchman; and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for
A Season in the West. Read's novels
A Married Man (1984) and
The Free Frenchman (1988) were adapted for television;
Alive was made into a feature film by the director Frank Marshal in 1993; and
Monk Dawson by Tom Waller in 1998.
Alive Read is best known for his non-fiction book
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors which documented the story of the 1972 crash of
Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in the
Andes Mountains.
Alive won the
Thomas More Medal for the most distinguished contribution to Catholic literature in 1974 and has sold more than five million copies worldwide. The book was adapted into the 1993 film
Alive: The Miracle of the Andes.
Other work Read's first notable success was his novel
Monk Dawson (1969), which won him a
Hawthornden Prize and a
Somerset Maugham Award, and was later made into the
1998 film of the same name by
Tom Waller. In 1978 he wrote the book
The Train Robbers about the
Great Train Robbery in England in 1963. In 1988 he was awarded a
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his book
A Season in the West. In 2003 his authorised biography of the actor
Alec Guinness was published. In 2009 he wrote
The Death of a Pope () set with the
2005 Papal conclave as a backdrop. In 2015 he wrote
Scarpia (), a fictional retelling of the story in the
Puccini opera
Tosca. In 2023 he wrote
A History of the Catholic Church, covering the church's history from its Jewish roots to the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI.
Archive Read's archive of literary papers and correspondence is held by Special Collections in the
Brotherton Library at the
University of Leeds. The collection consists of 139 boxes and contains manuscripts and typescripts of his novels and plays. It also contains articles and short stories; extensive correspondence, interview tapes and research notes; press-cuttings and other papers. His stories focus on the religious themes of sin and redemption. Read writes in a fairly traditional, linear style and he often uses plot elements from popular fiction, especially the
thriller, like
espionage, murder and
conspiracy theories. Most of his main characters are fairly unsympathetic and some of them commit horrific deeds before they finally convert to God. Almost all of Read's novels are set in Europe. Many of his books show a great interest and sympathy especially for Germany – quite unusual in
British literature – and for Eastern European countries like
Russia and
Poland. In
The Knights of the Cross, he explicitly
satirises the expectations and
prejudices of the British readership towards the Germans. ==List of works==