He has written songs for Elvis Presley, screenplays for the BBC and music for Miss Marple. But now, Ken Howard, a leading composer and film producer, has turned his hand to a different sort of writing - teenage fiction.
His debut book, The Young Chieftain, is about a black American teenager called Jamie. When his dad is killed, he and his mother travel from their Los Angeles home to a remote Scottish island to bury him. Jamie finds himself at the heart of ancient feuds, which put his life at risk.
The award-winning TV and film producer and director tells People: "There are very few mixed-race heroes in teen fiction, which is curious considering we live in a multi-racial society and Jamie in my book is very much in the Obama mould. It is an adventure story, but also about what we are and who we can become.
"The story was going to be a TV drama with Granada TV and Disney but this didn't happen so I decided to turn it into a novel." Mr Howard runs production company Landseer, which has made many films for the South Bank Show. His programme on violinist Maxim Vengerov, Living the Dream, won the Silver Screen Award at the US International Film & Video Festival. He also made two Dispatches programmes for Channel Four: No Exit with Bernard Levin was about the Soviet Jewish refuseniks and The Russians are Coming, which dealt with the exodus of Russian Jews to Israel. He has twice won the Royal Television Society Award's Best Children's Programme; for Braveheart and Today I am a Man. "The latter was about a British boy about to have his barmitzvah, twinned with a Russian lad."
A prominent composer, Mr Howard wrote the score for the theatre productions of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole and Roald Dahl's Matilda. I've Lost You, which he wrote for Elvis Presley, was a top ten hit. He says: "I enjoy writing for children -- I still feel like a teenager at heart."
He also runs a board games company Sophisticated Games and the children's charity the Casey Trust, and says he has a couple of ideas for other children's novels.
