Dan Hett is a BAFTA-winning cross-disciplinary writer, artist and games designer.
Hett’s experimental narrative approach has evolved directly through his unconventional trajectory through games writing, digital art, software engineering, and increasingly writing for both screen and print fiction. Creating work in parallel across contrasting disciplines has resulted in an original and uncompromising approach to storytelling, worrying less about the medium and focusing on non-linear and challenging story structures first. His approach is strongly influenced by games and interactive writing, mapping forward-thinking structure onto traditional screen and print media to create something entirely new.
Hett has previously worked on games and interactive adaptations for a large number of programmes and projects at the BBC, including being on a number of BAFTA-winning and nominated projects for CBBC and CBeebies (The Dumping Ground, Strange Hill High, Wolfblood), including a year as lead engineer on the CBeebies Storytime project. This was followed by a stint working on non-linear narratives and new thinking around storytelling and production for the BBC’s prestigious Research & Development wing. Hett is also an established touring digital artist, exhibiting narrative games and digital art as far afield as Buenos Aires, Seattle, Lahore and Karachi.
Hett’s trajectory was shifted significantly in 2017, following the loss of his brother Martyn in the Manchester Arena terror attack. His creative output changed trajectory too, initially taking the shape of a number of short introspective narrative games (c ya laterrrr, The Loss Levels, Sorry To Bother You), and culminating in Closed Hands, an unflinching deep interactive fiction project exploring radicalisation, extremism and identity politics in the UK. During this time he became a founder member of Survivors Against Terror, and has written extensively on the subject of extremism and digital culture for the likes of the Observer, the Guardian, the Huffington Post and the BBC.
He’s currently engaged in exploring unconventional and games-influenced approaches to screenwriting. This includes Last Man, a bold non-linear television drama series examining right-wing radicalisation within working-class communities – recently optioned for development by Lime Pictures. Hett is also currently working on his first full-length novel, Arc Boundary (working title), a YA science fiction story exploring the refugee crisis through the lens of a science fiction narrative set in the skies above a partially terraformed world.