Already known in Doctor Who fan circles, Cornell's
professional writing career began in 1990 when he was a
winner in a young writers’ competition and his entry,
Kingdom Come, was produced and screened on BBC Two. Soon
after, he wrote Timewyrm: Revelation, a novel for the Virgin
New Adventures series of Doctor Who novels. Timewyrm:
Revelation was a reworking of a serialised fan fiction piece
Cornell had penned previously for the fanzine Queen Bat.
Several other Doctor Who novels followed, including the
award-winning Human Nature.
Cornell then began working for Granada Television, where he
wrote for the popular children’s medical drama Children's
Ward and created his own children’s series Wavelength for
Yorkshire Television, which ran for two series. He made the
crossover to working in adult television full-time in 1996,
when he was one of the main contributors to Granada’s
supernatural soap opera Springhill, which ran for two years
on Sky One and later on Channel 4.
After a short stint on Coronation Street, he began working
for other production companies, including contributing an
episode in 1999 to Red Production Company’s anthology drama
series Love in the 21st Century for Channel 4. His episode,
entitled Masturbation, starred Ioan Gruffudd as Jack. He was
due to be one of the writers on Red Production Company’s
planned Queer as Folk spin-off series Misfits, but the
series was never made, being abruptly cancelled by Channel
4.
In the 21st century he has written mainly for the BBC,
contributing episodes to all three of their regular medical
dramas: Casualty, Holby City and the daytime soap opera
Doctors. He has also contributed to the 1950s-set Sunday
evening prime time drama series Born and Bred and was one of
the writers of the 2005 series revival of Doctor Who,
writing the episode "Father's Day". The episode was
nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation,
Short Form in 2006 and came third in terms of votes for its
category. Cornell later wrote a two-part story for Doctor
Who's 2007 series, based on his 1995 Virgin New Adventures
novel Human Nature. The title of the first episode was also
"Human Nature", while the second was titled "The Family of
Blood".
In February 2006, Cornell announced in a post on his weblog
that he would be writing an episode for the BBC's
forthcoming Robin Hood, produced by Tiger Aspect Productions
for the same Saturday evening family slot as Doctor Who. He
later announced on his blog that he was also writing a
second Robin Hood episode for later in the first series. His
first episode, "Who Shot The Sheriff?", aired on BBC One on
October 21, 2006. His second, "A Thing Or Two About
Loyalty", followed on December 2, 2006. He is writing an
episode for the second season of another Saturday evening
family adventure programme, the ITV science-fiction series
Primeval, due for transmission in 2008.[3]
Outside of television, he has been active in various other
media, having written six Doctor Who novels for Virgin
Publishing and BBC Books during the 1990s, three Doctor Who
audio dramas for Big Finish Productions and a fully-animated
internet-broadcast Doctor Who adventure, Scream of the
Shalka (starring Richard E. Grant as the Doctor) for BBCi in
2003. He has also written two mainstream science-fiction
novels, Something More and British Summertime for Gollancz,
and various novels, short stories and audio dramas based
around a character he created for the New Adventures,
Professor Bernice Summerfield, and whom he later licensed to
Big Finish Productions.
He has also co-authored (often working with Keith Topping
and Martin Day) several non-fiction books on television,
including The Guinness Book of Classic British TV, X-treme
Possibilities (a guide to The X-Files), and The
Discontinuity Guide (a humorous guide to Doctor Who).
(Topping and Day's Doctor Who novel The Devil Goblins from
Neptune was also based on an original idea with Cornell.) He
has also written comics, both for Doctor Who Magazine and
2000AD spin-off Judge Dredd Megazine.
He has written Wisdom, a 6-issue limited series for Marvel
Comics' MAX imprint, featuring the character Pete Wisdom,
with art by Trevor Hairsine and Manuel Garcia.
It was announced at the 2007 Wizard World Chicago comic book
convention that Cornell will be following Chris Claremont on
Marvel's New Excalibur.
{Sourced from Wikipedia page on Paul Cornell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Cornell}
For more information on Paul Cornell visit the official
website
