I AM KEN

Hey, I'm Ken Rogan.

For the past 15 years I have been writing feature scripts, plays, spec scripts for TV, comedy sketches, my own stand-up comedy, a press column for a couple of years, and various features in magazines and newspapers.

If there’s a throughline in my work - outside of stand-up, where you’ll do literally anything for a laugh! - it’s that I’m trying to get to the emotional core of whatever I’m writing about, in whatever medium that may be. I’m trying to move people. Make them feel something.

Most recently, the script editor who worked on my pilot signed off by saying, “there’s a lot of heart on the page.” Meanwhile, the consultant who helped me develop my feature script, Savannah & Jack, said, “this is a story with a lot of heart,” and that’s true. Nominally, it’s about an exiled hyena shepherding a baby gazelle across the perils of the African plain to the safety of the herd, in return for her mother’s ultimate sacrifice. But what it’s really about is a hyena who finds the love he always craved from his mother in his adopted gazelle daughter - and how he’ll fight his own family to keep her alive.

My most successful work, the stage play Hero (starring the excellent Daithi Mac Suibhne of Fair City fame), is also about matters of the heart. There again I sought to bring out those moments in the first rushes of love that we all recognise, and it struck a chord with audiences across a tour of 11 venues and almost 40 performances.

So, whether it’s feature scripts, or plays, or columns about the sudden death of my father, or the not so sudden death of my great Auntie Kitty, it’s always about those core moments and feelings that we share. Here’s an article I wrote for the Irish Times about a man with Parkinson’s disease that exemplifies the point.

If you’re looking for a writer who’s all about heart, I’d love to hear from you.