 Alan Durband was born in Liverpool England in June 1927, the only child of ship’s carpenter Joseph William Durband. His mother Edith Durband (née Ashcroft) was particularly ambitious for her son and even before he was born, began making sacrifices and saving money from their modest income for the time when she might have to pay for a grammar school education. In the event, Alan won a scholarship to the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys (since transformed into LIPA, where there is now the Alan Durband Room) and after gaining an MA in English at Downing College, Cambridge University he returned to the
Institute as English master. Here, his most famous pupil was Paul McCartney.
During this period, he produced his first text books, the English Workshop series, and then, for older children, Contemporary English. His play series New Directions featured one-act plays often by new writers, many of whom went on to be household names. They appealed to a great
number of schools and colleges, as did his later Playbill, Prompt and Wordplays series. See Other books for details. In the early seventies, he moved on to become head of
English at the CF Mott College of Education, Huyton. One of his students was having a particularly rough time on teaching practice, trying to get a tough inner-city class interested in Shakespeare. Each night, Alan provided him with an excerpt from Macbeth translated into modern English. The impact on the pupils was dramatic, and out of that grew Shakespeare Made Easy. Theatre was a passion for Alan Durband and during the
early sixties he led a campaign to save Liverpool’s ‘New Shakespeare’ theatre. In 1964, he jointly founded the Liverpool Everyman Theatre where he served for nearly 30 years as vice-chair, chair and vice-president. The Shakespeare Made Easy books were written in Benidorm, Spain where in later years he and his wife Audrey spent their winters. He would often write sitting on the beach,
with Audrey transcribing his work each day onto what now seems a very primitive word processor. After many years of heart trouble, it was in Spain that Alan Durband died in November 1993 at the age of 66. In 1997 an event was organised by playwright (and former Writer-in-Residence at CF Mott College of Education) Willy Russell to pay tribute to Alan and to unveil a plaque at the Liverpool Everyman theatre. Former Everyman actors including Pete Postlethwaite OBE were there, and children’s writer Brian Jacques. Many who could not attend sent tributes -
including Sir Paul McCartney who wrote that Alan Durband ‘was the most important teacher of my school years.’ | 
