In Pursuit of Justice: Lockerbie
4th April 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM BST
On 21 December 1988, Pan Am flight 103 was flying over Lockerbie when a bomb in the cargo hold exploded, killing 270 people. It remains the deadliest terrorist attack in UK history.
Acclaimed playwright David Harrower (Knives In Hens, Blackbird, A Slow Air) is the writer of Sky Atlantic’s 2025 series Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, starring Colin Firth. Based on The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice by Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph, the series follows Jim and Jane Swire’s dogged pursuit of justice for the victims of the bombing, including their daughter Flora.
This event explores the use of drama in campaigning for justice, placing Lockerbie: A Search for Truth in a lineage of consciousness-raising TV from Cathy Come Home in 1966 to last year’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Drama can shine a light on issues of truth, mercy and redress, but what responsibility does the writer have when portraying real people and events? How are the demands of art and story balanced with personal ethics? What can Jim Swire’s decades-long search for answers about the Lockerbie bombing tell us about justice and its limits?
David Harrower is an Olivier-Award-winning and Tony-nominated Scottish playwright and screenwriter. He has just written and executive produced 5 episodes for Carnival / NBC Universal / Sky’s original TV series Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, based on the true story of Jim Swire’s search for justice after his daughter died in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. The series is directed by Otto Bathurst, stars Colin Firth, and premiered in January 2025 to critical acclaim. Film includes an adaptation of his play Blackbird as a feature film for Film 4, retitled Una, directed by Benedict Andrews and starring Rooney Mara, Ben Mendelsohn and Riz Ahmed. Theatre includes Blackbird (written at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities), which won an Olivier Award for Best New Play for its premiere in the West End in 2006 before transferring to New York, and which received 3 Tony nominations including Best Revival for its Broadway revival in 2016. He’s currently writing a new TV series for Submarine based on a true story about espionage during the Cold War, with Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) attached to direct.
