The poet with a passion for adventure (From Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard)

The poet with a passion for adventure

With a career spanning so many mediums and a list of personal achievements that no number of column inches could satisfy it is difficult to know where to begin describing the work of Leo Aylen.

He has been nominated for a BAFTA, written eight collections of poetry and been published in more than 100 anthologies, co-scripted a Hollywood film and is a personal friend to the renowned South African politician, Prince Buthelezi, president of the Inkatha Freedom Party - and much more.

Leo was born in KwaZulu, South Africa, where his father Charles, an Anglican priest, was elected Bishop of Zululand by the black population, much to the chagrin of the whites.

When he was a child the family returned to live in the west of England, about 50 miles from his current North Wiltshire home in Sherston, a move which he believes makes him "ethnically west country" and also began a love of the area that he retains today.

He completed a first class degree in classics at New College, Oxford followed with a PhD in drama from Bristol University.

As a 22-year-old Oxford undergraduate he was part of an eight strong group that broke new ground by running from Land's End to John O'Groats, with each runner completing 110 miles of the 880 mile journey. He said: "We didn't know what we were doing because no-one had ever done this before.

"It was a great thing to have done. We discovered afterwards we had held the record for two years."

Although he works across the media of television, theatre and radio, he has always seen himself as a writer, and with numerous live poetry shows to his name has lived out his ethos of bringing his work to life.

"I found myself writing poetry and then people started to want to publish it or record it, but my idea of poetry is always the theatrical end of it.

"To me, poetry is very much something which comes alive when it is performed.

"Obviously I've had books published but I like to think of them as something people would take away and do something with.

"What I like to do is to have performed the poem in front of an audience by the time I've published it.

"The thing about poetry is to keep doing it more or less all the time.

"I more or less work every day."

To this end he has performed not just on stage and TV (he has had three solo shows on American television), but he has delivered his verse to 3,000 Zulus in an open-air ampitheatre, not to mention more than 300 appearances at North American university campuses.

He admits to only ever having had two "proper" jobs in his life - working on a building site and being a staff director for BBC TV.

He is currently working on a series of six science documentaries for use by schools.

They explore something known as the chaos and pattern theory and are based on experiments from the University of Bath, among them a cure for diabetes and developing the next stage after optical fibre cables.

He co-wrote the 2003 Hollywood film Gods and Generals, based on the American Civil War, but admits the end product was not to his liking thanks to the influence of the film's executive producer, former CNN owner and native of southern America, Ted Turner.

Leo said: "Ted Turner is from Georgia and the film has become very pro-south.

"The justification for the north going to war has been lost."

Among his many other credits are a nomination for a BAFTA for The Drinking Party, Raven Warrior, a screenplay based on a Native American legend, regular broadcasts on BBC Radios Three and Four and a two-part documentary about the King of Thailand, the first time the monarch had appeared on TV.

It is poetry, however, that is central to all he does: "If I was told that I was going to die in six months then I would concentrate on the poetry.

"It's the centre, it's the start and the finish and all that and I suppose I'm always looking at the other things I do with a poet's eyes or ears or nose.

"I like real life things but then that's because real life is often stranger than anything else."

The most exciting project he has completed was a commission to write poems based on current affairs for the 1990s Radio Four show, Anderson Country, which later became the Afternoon Shift.

He said: "It was terribly nerve wracking. It was very sharp-ended stuff but it was very exciting.

"I would love to do it on TV, but that hasn't come up yet.

"I love to do that kind of contemporary, absolutely of the minute stuff."

With a passion for travel Leo has had many adventures, not least climbing several 4,000 metre peaks in the Alps.

In 1987 however, at a time when South Africa's apartheid movement was still in force, he was detained by intelligence officers from the country's army for possessing books by banned black writers.

Then, as now, he had many friends among the Zulu political movement, and was more worried about his interrogators finding his list of contacts than anything else.

He said: "I worked out I caused them to lose 15 man hours. There were five of them and I was there for three hours, so it was quite serious.

"They were not stupid, they were bright and very keen. I was very frightened."

However, as an 'anglophone', a white man who speaks English and not Afrikaans, he was not deemed a threat and was released, with outlawed literature intact.

Now he is safely back on English soil and is weighing up where he will settle down in the long term.

He said: "I see myself in this area. I love Sherston and would love to stay in Sherston, but I see myself as somewhere between Bristol and Bath."