Ginny Dougary

Ginny Dougary is an award-winning journalist and writer. She is the author of The Executive Tart and Other Myths – an exploration of women in the media, and a contributor to several anthologies: Ok You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors, edited by Luc Sante and Melissa Holbrook Pierson (Pantheon (USA) and Granta (UK)) and Amazonian: Penguin Book of Women's New Travel Writing (Penguin), edited by Sara Wheeler and Dea Birkett.

She has written for most of the national newspapers in the UK and her articles are syndicated worldwide, most regularly to the Sydney Morning Herald’s colour supplement “Good Weekend” – where she was senior staff writer in the 1980s after living for a year in New York.

Since 1992, Ginny Dougary has been contracted to The Times, where she writes major interviews for the Saturday magazine and newspaper. News-breaking interviews include Michael Portillo, the Duchess of York, Norman Lamont and Jeanette Winterson. Journalistic highlights (but not always enjoyable encounters): Madonna, Norman Mailer, Elizabeth Taylor, Donald Trump, Salman Rushdie, Bob Geldof.

In 2009-2010, she conducted in-depth interviews with the most signficant British politicans of recent times: Tony Blair, David Cameron, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson. She was also shortlisted Interviewer of the Year for the seventh year at the UKPG press awards.

In 2005, she wrote the lyrics for a collection of songs about David Blunkett’s life and recent times. These were showcased at the Soho Theatre under the working title of David Blunkett The Musical; a collaboration with the composer MJ Paranzino and producer Martin Witts who was behind the award-winning one-man-play, “Hurricane”. The actors were Mark Perry, Robert Bathurst, Lynne Davies and Zigi Ellison.

As a result of this collaboration, Dougary and Paranzino were commissioned to write a 20-minute choral piece by Sir Terence Conran and Bluestorm to celebrate the restoration of Brighton’s celebrated Thirties modernist masterpiece, designed by Wells Coates. The piece ‘Vive Moderne’ was performed in September of 2005.

Two years later another choral collaboration with Paranzino, ‘Ginger Chorale’, was performed at the Royal Festival Hall in June 2007.