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WORK TITLE: Goldfish
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.natluurtsema.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: British
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: nb2012029677
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/nb2012029677
HEADING: Luurtsema, Nat
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670 __ |a Cuckoo in the nest, 2012: |b t.p. (Nat Luurtsema)
PERSONAL
Born in Watford, England.
EDUCATION:Attended Oxford University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, actor, and comedian. Member of the sketch comedy group Jigsaw; creator of the one-woman comedy show Here She Be! (2013); has appeared in films, including Island Queen (2012) and Florence Foster Jenkins (2016); director of films, including WYRDOES (2016).
WRITINGS
Writer of screenplays for films, including Island Queen (2012) and Annie’s Got Body Issues (2016).
SIDELIGHTS
Nat Luurtsema is a British writer, actor, and comedian. Born in Watford, England, she attended Oxford University, where she studied English. Luurtsema is a member of the sketch comedy group Jigsaw and has performed solo comedy shows, including Here She Be!, which concerned the breakup of her relationship with her longtime boyfriend and Jigsaw collaborator. In an interview with Veronica Lee, contributor to London’s Evening Standard, Luurtsema discussed the topics of her stand-up comedy shows, stating: “I have a couple of things that are private to me but the rest is up for grabs. … I don’t think I’m unique or special so I figure that anything I reveal about myself has happened to other people–so why would I be guarded about it? My stage persona is me two glasses of wine in–it’s a bigger version of me.” She has appeared as an actor in films, including Florence Foster Jenkins and Island Queen. She is also the screenwriter for the latter. Luurtsema told Chris Jones, writer for the Belfast Telegraph: “I enjoy writing films, because they can’t be about me. … I really enjoy the fact that I’m not taking anything of myself out there with me. I get to be different.”
In 2016, Luurtsema released her first young adult-novel, Goldfish. The volume was released in the United Kingdom under the title Girl out of Water. The book’s protagonist is Louise Brown, a high-school student and competitive swimmer. Louise and Hannah, her best friend, hope to have a chance at training for the Olympic team. Louise is devastated when Hannah makes it and she does not. Louise dreads going back to school without Hannah, who is one of her only friends. However, three popular boys from her class ask Louise to be their coach for a synchronized swimming performance. She discovers that she enjoys teaching swimming. Meanwhile, she develops a crush on one of the boys.
Goldfish received favorable assessments from critics. Erin Segreto, reviewer in Voice of Youth Advocates, asserted: “This story is excellent at illustrating self-reliance and the power of friendship.” Segreto concluded: “This book will appeal to all readers.” Writing in Horn Book magazine, Sarah Gomez suggested: “If the premise of this British import feels somewhat unrealistic, … Goldfish makes up for it with a protagonist who really acts and sounds her age.” A Publishers Weekly critic commented, “A touch of romance and a tested friendship round out a broadly enjoyable read.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Horn Book, May-June, 2016, Sarah Gomez, review of Goldfish, p. 106.
Publishers Weekly, April 11, 2016, review of Goldfish, p. 63.
Telegraph (Belfast, Northern Ireland), January 10, 2014, Chris Jones, “Nat Luurtsema: A Funny Thing Happened When I Broke Up with My Boyfriend,” author interview.
Voice of Youth Advocates, August, 2016, Erin Segreto, review of Goldfish, p. 64.
ONLINE
Evening Standard Online, http://www.standard.co.uk/ (January 21, 2014), Veronica Lee, “Writer Nat Luurtsema on Her Bafta-Nominated Comedy Film.”
Nat Luurtsema Home Page, http://www.natluurtsema.com (April 6, 2017).
ABOUT NAT
website-films.jpgNat Luurtsema is a BAFTA-nominated screenwriter, a BAFTA Rocliffe alumni, stand-up comic, author, actor and a third of sketch group Jigsaw.
She has just finished directing WYRDOES, a comedy feminist ‘Macbeth’, with backing from Film London, Film4 and the British Arts Council. It will be a part of the Shakespeare Lives worldwide tour, which will play to an audience of 500 million.
Nat plays Tallulah Bankhead in FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS, directed by Stephen Frears.
Nat is developing two feature films and adapting the novel Spilt Milk Black Coffee by Helen Cross, for Mighty Atom Entertainment.
Nat’s latest book is a Young Adult novel – GIRL OUT OF WATER – to be published June 2016 in the UK, Germany, France and Italy. It will simultaneously publish as GOLDFISH in USA.
“Disgustingly talented” The Guardian
“Wincingly funny” The Observer
“A perfect blend of smart and silly.” Spoonfed Comedy
“An original thinker” Chortle
QUOTED: "I have a couple of things that are private to me but the rest is up for grabs. ... I don’t think I’m unique or special so I figure that anything I reveal about myself has happened to other people–so why would I be guarded about it? My stage persona is me two glasses of wine in–it’s a bigger version of me.”
Going OutFilm
Writer Nat Luurtsema on her Bafta-nominated comedy film
A dark comedy about a sperm-bank hiccup — made for just £1,000 — has been nominated in next month’s Bafta film awards. Writer Nat Luurtsema is in a tizz, she tells Veronica Lee
VERONICA LEE Tuesday 21 January 2014 10:19 GMT0 comments
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Click to follow
ES Going Out
36NatLuurtsema2101A.jpg
The focus at the Baftas next month will be on Steve McQueen’s monumental and harrowing drama 12 Years a Slave, which cost $20 million to make and is nominated in 10 categories — but among the other nods is Island Queen, a wonderfully dark, low-budget comedy made by two young Londoners, Nat Luurtsema and Ben Mallaby, which couldn’t be more different.
It’s in the short film category — at “the bottom end of the card,” as its writer Luurtsema self-deprecatingly jokes — but she and director Mallaby are chuffed to be in the company of more established film-makers such as McQueen and Martin Scorsese (for The Wolf of Wall Street). When Luurtsema (pronounced LURTS-sem-mer) and I meet over tea at the Radisson Blu Edwardian Hampshire hotel in Leicester Square, she talks excitedly about the ceremony at the Royal Opera House on February 16 — although, she says: “I have absolutely nothing to wear. When I heard we had been nominated I sent a message on Twitter asking if anyone could lend me a dress.”
Island Queen was made for £1,000 with the help of students from Falmouth University and Eugene Hughes, a private investor who had liked Mallaby’s previous short films. Luurtsema stars as Miriam, 30, busy going nowhere, still living with her parents on a small island and working seasonally on a ferry boat with her friend Danny (Sam Pamphilon). She tells him she has decided to have a baby and has visited the island’s sperm bank. The only trouble is, so has her younger brother (Sam Perry) ... It’s a very funny and touching comedy about love and friendship, told in 16 minutes.
Mallaby and Luurtsema filmed it in four days in Cornwall, with everyone doubling up as cast and crew. Luurtsema, who clearly has charm to spare, persuaded daytrippers to appear as unpaid extras, which leads to a priceless moment when Miriam and Danny discuss whether she would have sex with a dog, and the elderly woman behind her looks genuinely aghast.
Luurtsema, 31, was born in Watford to an English mother, a teaching assistant and waitress, and a half-Dutch, half-Indonesian father, who is an accountant and barman. She was a bookish and shy child (although now, by her own admission, a chatterbox), and ferociously bright, winning scholarships to the Royal Masonic School for Girls in Rickmansworth and then to Oxford to read English. “I plateaued at university,” she says, “where I was very middling. It was refreshing, because I realised I had peaked early and was not academic.”
While she was at boarding school she developed an eating disorder and was hospitalised at 13, and says it is something she is always mindful of. “I have an obsessive personality, I guess — but it means I work really hard.”
Although she has appeared in television and radio comedies and written for shows including Mock the Week and 8 Out of 10 Cats, it was as a stand-up that Luurtsema came to many people’s attention. At the Edinburgh Fringe last year she performed She Be Here, which charted the break-up of her three-and-half-year relationship with fellow comic Tom Craine, her colleague (with Dan Antopolski) in the sketch group Jigsaw (who have a second Radio 4 series later this year).
36ISLANDQUEEN2101A.jpg
He performed his own show about the split, Crying on a Waltzer, and Luurtsema describes the comically complicated scenario last August. “I was doing my show about him, rushing across to the Pleasance Courtyard to appear on a sketch show with him and then he would dash off to do a show about me. I saw his but I wouldn’t let him see mine because I was scared he would object to some of the things in it and I would have to take them out,” she jokes.
“He was way more complimentary about me. But he’s still my best friend and we talk about 10 times a day.”
They had moved in together on the second date. “The lease was up on my flat and we were so heady about being in love that we did it. I’m very romantic and I can get really giddy at the beginning of a relationship. I have oxytocin overload.”
Island Queen is not autobiographical — the idea was inspired by a news item about the concern that sperm banks in Iceland, which has a population of only 320,000, have about donors and recipients being unrelated. Luurtsema, currently single, has no plans to visit a sperm bank any day soon — but much of her work is about her life.
Her break-up with Craine came after a period when she had moved back to her parents’ house, an experience she turned into a sharply observed memoir. Cuckoo in the Nest, her first Edinburgh show, was about her eating disorder and now she is writing her second book, a novel for young adults, about a teenager who is an Olympic swimming hopeful — as was Luurtsema. I ask if there’s anything about her life she wouldn’t plunder for material.
“I have a couple of things that are private to me but the rest is up for grabs,” she replies. “I don’t think I’m unique or special so I figure that anything I reveal about myself has happened to other people — so why would I be guarded about it? My stage persona is me two glasses of wine in — it’s a bigger version of me.”
Her second project with Mallaby, a university friend of Craine’s — “I got a share of him in the split. I see everything in words, he sees things in pictures, it’s the perfect pairing” — does not, however, spring from her life.
Annie Has Body Issues, which starts shooting in May, is a feature-length film — again written by Luurtsema and directed by Mallaby — which she describes as “a female-led black comedy marrying the tone of Bridesmaids with a bit of Shallow Grave”.
“It’s about Annie [played by Luurtsema], who wakes up after a house party and finds a dead woman on her sofa, and has no idea how she got there. It’s the woman who stole her job and her boyfriend so she’s in the frame and has to get rid of the body, and she recruits her best friend, Gwyn, to help her. It’s a film about loyalty and accountability and looking after your friends — and getting rid of dead bodies, of course...”
As we part, the issue of a dress for the Bafta ceremony crops up again. “I live in jeans and clothes from Tom and Dan that have shrunk in the wash. I can’t turn up in an old Fred Perry shirt.”
QUOTED: "I enjoy writing films, because they can't be about me. ... I really enjoy the fact that I'm not taking anything of myself out there with me. I get to be different."
Nat Luurtsema: A funny thing happened when I broke up with my boyfriend
By Chris Jones
January 10 2014
Nat Luurtsema1
1
Nat Luurtsema
Even by the soul-baring standards of confessional stand-up, Nat Luurtsema is more fearless than most. Not only was her Edinburgh festival show Here She Be! – which she's bringing to Belfast's Out to Lunch festival in a fortnight's time – focussed on her break-up from her boyfriend of three-and-a-half years, that boyfriend (fellow comedian Tom Craine) happens to remain a member of her sketch comedy group, Jigsaw. Oh, and his Edinburgh show was about exactly the same break-up, but from his perspective.
"I would do my show about breaking up with him and then I'd run over to the Pleasance Courtyard and do my sketch show with him, and then he would run across the courtyard and do his solo show about breaking up with me!" she says.
The entire arrangement sounds awkward at best, and Luurtsema says that the two didn't realise that they had written their entire shows about each other until they got to the festival. "Of course, the break-up had been on our minds and we'd both developed [material]," she says. "But we never talked about it – it was only when we got to Edinburgh and suddenly there were a lot of press articles on the fact the two shows were a mirror."
Luurtsema insists that she and Craine remain best friends, and that all is fair in love and comedy. "It's not really painful," she says. "When we first started going out, he had some material about an ex-girlfriend and I said he should pretend it's all me, just so the gags flow more easily. And we've always had that kind of relationship – if it serves the stand-up, we don't mind being lied about."
That approach may serve the comedy well, but how conducive is confessional comedy to a settled personal life? Not very, it seems.
"I gig most evenings and I must meet hundreds of people a week, so you'd think it must be easy," says Nat. "My friend said to me, 'Yeah, maybe you should stop telling jokes about your previous relationships ...'.
Luurtsema's first book, Cuckoo In The Nest, was a memoir of the time she was forced to move back in with her parents at the age of 28, after it proved harder than she imagined to find a new flat.
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"I was so lonely and we were squabbling so much," she recalls. "I started writing a blog for no other reason than that I'd have no-one to talk to at four in the morning when I came in from a gig. The Sunday Times picked it up and by Christmas I had a book deal."
While Craine, a fellow comedian, might be seen as fair game for some public ribbing, parents are an altogether different matter. So how did they deal with their home life being available for public consumption?
"They had no problems with it," says Nat. "But then when they were being interviewed by journalists, who were asking questions that showed they knew things about my parents' private life, I think they found that weird. I'm not sure I'd open my family to such public scrutiny again."
But then perhaps she won't have to. Luurtsema is fast developing a reputation as something of a polymath. Her first screenplay, for the short film Island Queen, was long-listed for a BAFTA and her first feature film, Annie Has Body Issues, starts shooting in May. All this while writing her second book. After spending so much time talking about herself and those around her, it sounds like she is ready to move on.
"I enjoy writing films, because they can't be about me," she says. "Especially this feature film. I really enjoy the fact that I'm not taking anything of myself out there with me. I get to be different."
QUOTED: "This story is excellent at illustrating self-reliance and the power of friendship."
"This book will appeal to all readers."
Luurtsema, Nat. Goldfish
Erin Segreto
Voice of Youth Advocates.
39.3 (Aug. 2016): p64.
COPYRIGHT 2016 E L Kurdyla Publishing LLC
http://www.voya.com
Full Text:
4Q * 3P * J * S
Luurtsema, Nat. Goldfish. Feiwel & Friends/Macmillan, 2016. 240p. $17.99. 978-1-25008918-2.
Swimming is all that Louise "Lou" Brown has known her entire life. And she is good at it. So good that her own mother nicknamed her Goldfish
because of the many gold medals she has won. All that remains now is to qualify for the Olympics, a life-long dream Lou hopes to realize
alongside her best friend Hannah. Unfortunately, Lou does not qualify and comes in dead last. Hannah, however, is headed to the Olympics,
having come in first. Lou is faced with putting aside her jealousy and learning to accept her new life, one that does not include swimming. After
being shunned by her former coach and teammates, Lou is unexpectedly asked to train three popular boys for Britain's hottest TV talent show in
synchronized swimming. Although hesitant at first, she realizes this is something she is not only useful at doing, but also enjoys. As it turns out,
life for Hannah at Olympic training camp is no day in the park. Lou learns to help both her newest and oldest friends in different and lifechanging
ways.
Goldfish, Luurtsema's first novel for young adults, is a laugh-out-loud tale of an above-average swimmer adjusting to what she believes is a
below-average life after having her Olympic dreams crushed. This story is excellent at illustrating self-reliance and the power of friendship. A
welcome addition to any middle or high school fiction collection, Goldfish proves that talent does not define a person and helping others is worth
more than gold medals. This book will appeal to all readers.--Erin Segreto.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Segreto, Erin. "Luurtsema, Nat. Goldfish." Voice of Youth Advocates, Aug. 2016, p. 64. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461445146&it=r&asid=f1a3d22b8181cdc07ce8c6b6e49a2cc9. Accessed 19 Mar.
2017.
3/19/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1489975582505 2/5
Gale Document Number: GALE|A461445146
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QUOTED: "If the premise of this British import feels somewhat unrealistic, … Goldfish makes up for it with a protagonist who really acts and sounds her age."
3/19/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1489975582505 3/5
Goldfish
Sarah Hannah Gomez
The Horn Book Magazine.
92.3 (May-June 2016): p106.
COPYRIGHT 2016 The Horn Book, Inc.. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Sources, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.hbook.com/magazine/default.asp
Full Text:
Goldfish
by Nat Luurtsema
Middle School, High School Feiwel 234 pp.
6/16 978-1-250-08918-2 $17.99 (g)
e-book ed. 978-1-250-08919-9 $9.99
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Louise's Olympic dreams are dashed when she comes in dead last at a qualifying swim meet. Her best friend Hannah takes what Lou thought
would be her spot at a prestigious swim training institute, and Lou dejectedly goes back to school, where her teammates won't speak to her and
her coach tells her she's done. Lou resigns herself to a dull year, and then three boys desperate to win a TV talent competition recruit her to train
them in synchronized swimming. Lou scrambles to learn about the sport, and things come humorously to a head when the group decides to
rehearse in the fish- and marine mammal-filled tanks at a local aquarium. Rarely, if ever, in YA do you see a friendship among three boys and a
girl where there is no romantic melodrama (a crush does develop, at a slow burn, between Lou and one of the boys). Lou's voice is irreverent and
self-deprecating, and the way Luurtsema explores body image--with Lou grappling with her perceptions about her athletic, decidedly-nothourglass
shape and trying to decide if she even cares whether boys look at her a certain way or not--is refreshing. That, and the fact that Lou is
biracial and suffers no identity crisis about it, sets her apart. If the premise of this British import feels somewhat unrealistic, and Lou's swim
coach seems unnecessarily, impossibly cruel, Goldfish makes up for it with a protagonist who really acts and sounds her age.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Gomez, Sarah Hannah. "Goldfish." The Horn Book Magazine, May-June 2016, p. 106. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453290668&it=r&asid=d11735aaae3a1aaf804cef7f3fc36648. Accessed 19 Mar.
2017.
3/19/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1489975582505 4/5
Gale Document Number: GALE|A453290668
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QUOTED: "A touch of romance and a tested
friendship round out a broadly enjoyable read."
3/19/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1489975582505 5/5
Goldfish
Publishers Weekly.
263.15 (Apr. 11, 2016): p63.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Goldfish
Nat Luurtsema. Feiwel and Friends, $17.99 (240p) ISBN 978-1-250-08918-2
Filled with slapstick antics, this lighthearted story of 15-year-old Louise Brown, a down-on-her-luck swimmer, deserves to make a splash with
readers. Gangly and unpppular, Louise lives in Essex, England, with her divorced parents and older sister. After she loses her chance at Olympic
stardom, she has to start a new school year without her best friend Hannah (who did qualify for Olympic training) and deal with her former
coach, who treats her like a pariah. When three A-list guys from school recruit Louise to coach them in synchronized swimming in an attempt to
get on Britain's Hidden Talent, things go laughably wrong. Louise's snarky sense of humor makes for highly entertaining reading ("I don't know
what they're trying to do, I don't know if it's even got a name or if it's just Drowning to Music"). Though the plot is straightforward, Luurtsema, in
her first book for teens, provides plenty of humiliating moments and awkward gaffes to keep readers laughing. A touch of romance and a tested
friendship round out a broadly enjoyable read. Ages 12-up. Agent: Hellie Ogden, Janklow & Nesbit. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Goldfish." Publishers Weekly, 11 Apr. 2016, p. 63. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449663047&it=r&asid=a235ca47c32294d6384a456e5b8dd260. Accessed 19 Mar.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449663047