Judy Pascoe
Judy Pascoe was born and educated in Australia, and is originally from Brisbane, in Queensland. During the writing of Our Father Who Art in a Tree she drew heavily on her memories of her homeland — and the power of the Australian landscape — to infuse her story with its rich sense of place. “I guess the point I wanted to make was that even in the blandest Australian suburb the power of the landscape is inescapable,” she has said. “Australians have been influenced by that landscape in more ways than they know.” Today, Pascoe lives in the historic Cotswolds region of Gloucestershire, England, with her partner of fifteen years and their two children, plus four chickens, a puppy, and a hamster.
When Pascoe originally set out to tell the story at the heart of Our Father Who Art in a Tree, she envisioned it as a film, and the film rights were sold to Disney Pictures. That this story began as a screenplay is not surprising, as Pascoe had worked for years in the performing and screen arts; she worked for many seasons as an acrobat with Circus Oz, touring Australia and the world, before relocating to the United Kingdom and becoming a stand-up comedienne on the U.K. comedy circuit. There, she has also worked as an actor, a television presenter, a scriptwriter, and a script doctor, but she has increasingly turned to writing since the birth of her children: “When I had kids I decided that I needed a job which did not involve so much travelling.”
Disney was excited about the project from the start. However, after five years of dealing with the film studio and the endless rewrites required as the story was “developed,” Pascoe became increasingly tired of the process. As is often the norm in Hollywood, the script was constantly in rewrites as different actors and actresses showed interest and as producers fluctuated between planning a high-budget visual feast and a simpler, elegant film that could be done for less money. “It is very hard when your work is changed on the whim of an actor or a director,” Pascoe has said, although she stuck with the development process for five years. “You do get sucked into the madness of it because it is quite funny really, but it is very frustrating.” In the end, when Disney asked to extend their option on the film rights, Pascoe declined.
It was then that Pascoe decided to turn the screenplay into a novel, and once she started writing she found the story took shape very quickly on the page. Writing while her kids were at school, she was determined from the start to create a novel that was literary and multi-levelled yet at the same time would not daunt readers who had busy lives. “I actually wrote it with people who have children in mind,” she has said. “It’s hard to find books which are short enough to have time for when you have kids.” What she ended up with is Our Father Who Art in a Tree: a slender novel at 208 pages, but one in which each image resonates with enough mythic force to crack the covers wide open.
With it, Judy Pascoe has been well received internationally as a novelist with a fresh new voice. Our Father Who Art in a Tree was published in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom in 2002, and in Canada and the United States in 2003. It will also be published in France, Sweden, Germany, Japan, and Italy.
