Ann Peacock

Ann Peacock is a South African-born screenwriter based in the United States. After teaching Law in her native South Africa, she moved to the United States and started a screenwriting career at after doing an Extension Course in screenwriting at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has received awards and nominations for her works A Lesson Before Dying (1999), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), and The First Grader (2015).

Peacock was born in 1951 and raised in South Africa.^[1] She was educated at the University of Cape Town, where she obtained her law degree,^[2] and taught in the faculty of Law.^[3]

Her screenwriting career began after she moved to the United States,^[1] writing her first screenplay June the 16th as a screenwriting student inspired by a family experience with internal resistance to apartheid.^[3] She wrote the HBO film A Lesson Before Dying (1999), for which she won the 1999 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie.^[4] In 2000, she adapted the Langston Hughes short story Cora Unashamed into a TV movie of the same name for PBS' The American Collection.^[5] In July 2002, Walden Media hired Peacock as the screenwriter for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,^[3] for which she was later nominated for the 2006 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form).^[6]

Her screenwriting credits also include In My Comedy (2004), Pictures of Hollis Woods (2007), Kit Kittredge: An American Girl (2008), Nights in Rodanthe (2008), and The Killing Room (2009)^{[7][8][1][2][9]} She won the 2012 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Writing in a Motion Picture for her screenplay The First Grader.^[10] In 2015, she adapted Alice Hoffman's book The Dovekeepers into a television miniseries of the same name for CBS.^[11]

She has a son who was engaged in the anti-apartheid movement.^[3]