Glenn Chandler is an award-winning Scottish playwright and novelist. He has written plays for theatre and radio, original screenplays for television and films, television series, and novels. His best-known work is the Scottish television detective series Taggart, which is broadcast around the world.

Biography

Glenn Chandler was born in Edinburgh in 1949, and educated at the Royal High School in the city. He moved from Scotland to London and began writing for the Soho Poly, where his early plays were produced. He went on to write for BBC Television and Radio, and for Granada Television (including its series Crown Court (TV series)) before creating and writing his own series Taggart for STV Productions (ITV Network).
Chandler created Taggart for STV's Controller of Drama, Robert Love, who wanted to set a police series in Glasgow. Chandler was inspired by true crime and real life, and even lifted the names of characters for the series from gravestones in Maryhill Cemetery in Glasgow. The series continued even after the death of the actor Mark McManus, who played the lead role of Jim Taggart, and became the longest-running police drama on British television.

Chandler has continued to write for his first love, theatre, and has also begun a series of books featuring a Brighton detective, DI Madden.

In 2008 Chandler took two plays to the Edinburgh Fringe as a producer: Boys of the Empire, a satirical play written by Chandler himself, and What's Wrong With Angry?, a drama set in 1992,
when the age of consent for homosexuals was 21. Both shows were directed by Patrick Wilde, with whom Chandler shares a literary agency, MBA.