Amnon Kabatchnik Wins Benjamin Franklin Competition Silver Medal for Blood on the Stage

Earlier this year we had the pleasure of welcoming Amnon Kabatchnik as our guest. His most recent book is Blood on the Stage: 1975-2000: Milestone Plays of Crime, Mystery, and Detection, an overview of the most important and memorable theatrical works of crime and detection of this period, and a book for which he was recently honored with a Silver Medal in the Benjamin Franklin Competition in the reference category.

This is the fourth book in this series by the author, which now completes his study of the entire 20th century. "A major surprise that I encountered upon the research trail were obscure, pirated dramatizations of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes adventure The Sign of Four, written and produced in America at the turn of the 20th century," he told us. "I was also astonished by the large number of main-stream novelists, playwrights and poets who have mixed their ink with blood penning crime, mystery and detection plays. Among them are Great Britain's John Masefield, John Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, John Osborne, Graham Greene, and the Americans Eugene O'Neill, John Steinbeck, Ayn Rand, William Saroyan, William Faulkner, Herman Wouk, Horton Foote, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams."

Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, Amnon Kabatchnik received his BS degree in theatre and journalism from Boston University, where he graduated summa cum laude, and won the Rodgers & Hammerstein Award. Kabatchnik also holds an MFA degree in directing from the Yale School of Drama. He served as Professor of Theatre at several universities, including Stanford University and Ohio State University, and directed numerous dramas, comedies, thrillers and musicals for off-Broadway, national road companies, resident theatres, summer stock, and abroad. To learn more about the author, visit his website at AmnonKabatchnik.com.