Peter Straughan

Early years and education

Straughan's first ambition was to be a professional musician and he achieved this while playing bass guitar with Newcastle-based band The Honest Johns. He spent four years touring and recording with the band through the late 1980s and into the early 1990s before leaving to take up full-time education at Newcastle University. While Straughan was a student he was also a member of the band Cactusman. He wrote the song "Killer", which appeared on the CD album North of London, a collection of music by North East bands released through Newcastle Arts.^[1]

Screenwriting

Straughan co-wrote the 2006 feature film, Mrs Ratcliffe's Revolution and adapted Toby Young's memoir How to Lose Friends & Alienate People. He is the writer of the 2009 film The Men Who Stare at Goats, and co-writer of the 2011 film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Adapted Screenplay, a screenplay he wrote in collaboration with his late wife Bridget O'Connor. O'Connor died of cancer, aged 49, in 2010, before the film was released. They were awarded a BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay.^[2]

Straughan adapted Hilary Mantel's trilogy of novels set in the royal court of Henry VIII for television. The three novels Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror & the Light were adapted into the 2015 Wolf Hall television series and its 2024 sequel Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.

In 2025, he won the Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay, the BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Conclave.^[3][4][5]