Alexander Chow-Stuart: Alexander Stuart

Photograph by Charong Chow

Alexander Stuart (aka Alexander Chow-Stuart) is a California-based, British-born screenwriter and novelist, whose books have been translated into eight languages and published in the US, Britain, Europe, Israel and throughout the world. His most controversial novel, The War Zone, about a family torn apart by incest, was turned into a multi-award-winning film by Oscar-nominated actor/director Tim Roth.

Screenplays

Stuart's screenplays include: The War Zone for Tim Roth/Film4; Bitten, for Angelina Jolie (Warner Bros); Head Shots, for Jodie Foster with Lorenzo di Bonaventura producing (Paramount); Under The Skin, for director Jonathan Glazer (Nick Wechsler Productions/Film4); Chinese Wall for producers Georgina Townsley and Alexandra Milchan at Rainmaker Films, with Clark Johnson directing; an adaptation of Toby Barlow's remarkable book, Sharp Teeth, for Film4; Whiteout, originally for Reese Witherspoon/Universal - now Kate Beckinsale/Dark Castle Entertainment/Warner Bros; an adaptation of Keith Scribner's kidnapping novel, The GoodLife, for Film4; and an adaptation of Bill Buford's wild tale of soccer hooligans, Among The Thugs for Kiefer Sutherland.

Stuart also served as executive producer of Nicolas Roeg's Insignificance, which brought together a fictionalized Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Joe DiMaggio and Senator Joe McCarthy, on one hot and humid night in New York.

Theresa Russell in Insignificance. Photo collage by David Hockney.

Books

Stuart's books include The War Zone (which "won and lost" Britain's prestigious Whitbread Prize for Best Novel - now the Costa Book Awards - amid controversy among the judges), Tribes, Life On Mars (which inspired the television documentary, The End of America), Five And A Half Times Three (written with Ann Totterdell, about the death from cancer of their five-and-a-half-year-old son, Joe Buffalo), and the children's books, Joe, Jo-Jo And The Monkey Masks and Henry And The Sea (written with Joe Buffalo Stuart).

Henry And The Sea, Catalan edition.

Other Work

Before moving to the United States, Stuart lived in London and Brighton, England. During the 1990s, he moved to Miami Beach, where he wrote Life On Mars, and taught screenwriting at the University of Miami. In 1997, he was commissioned by the Miami Art Museum to create an artwork, filmloop/fragments, to accompany a sculpture installation by the Polish artist, Magdalena Abakanowicz.

Stuart has also worked as a journalist all over the world, as a movie publicist and briefly ran a film and theater production company in London.

He now lives by a lake in Sonora, in the Sierra foothills between Yosemite and San Francisco, with his wife, Charong Chow, and their two children, a son born in 2004 and a daughter born in 2009. On September 22 2006, Stuart was sworn in as an American citizen. In 2007, he informally adopted the surname Chow-Stuart to celebrate the fusion of both family names in his children's surname.