About The Author

2006 is a wonderful year for Richard Sparks. Not only is Getting Lucky published, the sequel to 2005’s widely acclaimed Diary of a Mad Poker Player: 2006 also sees four world premieres in Richard’s other career as a librettist (including new translations of Mozart’s Seraglio, for the National Symphony in Washington, and Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel for the Los Angeles Opera).

While still at Oxford University, Richard wrote revues produced at the Edinburgh Festival. A dozen plays and adaptations followed, for companies all over the U.K., such as the Welsh National, the Chichester Festival and the West Yorkshire Playhouse, and London theatres including the Victoria Palace, the Latchmere, the Orange Tree, Greenwich, Hampstead and the Bush. It was at the Hampstead Theatre that the then-unknown Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) performed Richard's Schoolmaster sketch, which launched him to stardom in John Cleese’s show/film The Secret Policeman’s Ball.

Richard has written over sixty hours of broadcast TV worldwide (among others: The Famous Five, Not the Nine O’Clock News, The Worst of Hollywood, Valentine Park, The Optimist). While in New Zealand writing the 26-part adventure series The Flying Kiwi, Richard played in a poker game that included members of the New Zealand Davis Cup tennis team. At Auckland airport, on the way home, Richard noticed the book Total Poker, by David Spanier, and read it all the way across the Pacific.

David subsequently became a great friend and mentor, and he and Richard were regulars at two home games in London (which included two other poker authors, Al Alvarez and Anthony Holden). Richard and his family moved to Los Angeles in 1992 when Columbia Pictures TV hired him to work with the creators of Who’s the Boss? Now resident in California, Richard has written several new operas for the Los Angeles Opera, with composer Lee Holdridge. Together with Brian May of Queen, Lee and Richard created an opera for puppets for the New Line film The Adventures of Pinocchio. Songs for which Richard wrote the lyrics have been recorded by such diverse talents as Placido Domingo, Eric Idle, Vanessa Williams and Dom de Luise.