Opera singer, wandering minstrel, theatrical agent, West End casting director, broadcaster, theatre and opera critic, and sometime amateur harness-racehorse driver, Kurt Gänzl launched his writing career in in 1986 with an award-winning two-volume history of The British Musical Theatre. A further dozen volumes of multicoloured theatre history have followed, including the three-volume Enyclopaedia of the Musical Theatre, Musical Theatre on Record, Gänzl’s Book of the Musical Theatre (with Andrew Lamb), biographies of British burlesque queen Lydia Thompson, Australo-American comedian-playwright William B Gill, opera-bouffe diva Emily Soldene (2 vols) and a compendium of 100 biographies of Victorian Vocalists. His latest book is Gilbert & Sullivan: the Players and the Plays (2021). He has also worked with his brother, John Gallas, on translations of Baudelaire, Verhaeren, Materlinck, Yourcenar, Anna de Noailles, Nerval, Florian et al (52 Euros, The Song Atlas, Guardian Poem of the Week et al.)