Have you ever sent a fan letter/email and had a response?

[thelongroad]

Many, many years ago, when email was a new and exciting thing, I wrote to two authors that I admired very much, and they both wrote back :)
One was Jeanette Winterson, and the other was Douglas Anthony Cooper.

I'd read an article by JW and wrote to her basically saying I agreed with what she said, and she replied (literally immediately - she must have been checking her email when it came in), which I was rather chuffed about.

And DAC was similar - he replied really quickly on the same day, saying my email had cheered him right up as it happened to be his birthday on that day :)

And even longer ago than that, when I was in my late teens, I wrote to Jeremy Paxman and he wrote back (on BBC letterhead stationery, I'll never forget).
Oh and I've just remembered another one - I emailed the children's author Malachy Doyle about 10 years ago to tell him how much DS1 and I enjoyed Owen and the Mountain, and asking something about the book that DS wanted to know. He wrote a lovely email back, answering the question.

So have you, who to, and did they write back?

About 1984
Colin Hay from Men At work

Lovely letter back on very lairy yellow paper (like the cover to Business As Usual)

I win, don't I ?

Many many years ago some friends were trying to set up a youth group and wrote to actors - received lovely letters from Glenda Jackson, Sir John Gielgud and a phone call from John Hurt’s agent

This kinds of fits the post! When I was 18 I went to a music concert in Milton Keynes and was row 4/5 from the stage I found a ring which had flung off the performers hand during a set and I managed to get it returned to them during the intermission, I got invited backstage for a chat after the show and a photo etc.

Few years later for some reason I just decided to write and say that I wished I was at another concert and hope he was taking better care of his stupidly expensive jewellery!

I got response two / three weeks later and he said yes he was and how grateful he was as the ring was a present from a friend and irreplaceable and now he doesn't wear it for shows anymore, I got two tickets to a show of my choice as another thank you. No further contact but still nice to bother replying when many others wouldn't!

20 odd years ago I wrote to Samatha Giles (Bernice in Emmerdale). I felt the need to tell her that the story line she was involved in, had help save me. I had crippling post natal depression that was undiagnosed, and I was starting to have really dark thoughts. I could relate to her, so it was the push I needed to ask for help. She send me a lovely reply back on a compliments slip. I didn't expect a reply, so it was a nice touch.

Funnily enough I can relate to her again with going through the menopause.

I had never written to a celebrity before or since.

I wrote to Jacqueline Wilson in the very late 90's. I had a lovely hand written letter back with a self portrait and some doodles. I kept it for years and years but at some point in the last ten years it has gone AWOL.

I wrote to an actor who was in Nathan Barley via MySpace (!) to say how accurate his portrayal of a poncey magazine editor was and he wrote a nice thank you back. He was in Corrie for a while after that.

Many years ago a primary school in inner city Manchester did a ( shortened!) performance of A Midsummer Nights Dream. The teacher sent a letter from the children and some photos of the performance to Sir Laurence Olivier. He sent back a lovely handwritten letter that started "Dear fellow actors....."!

It was treasured by the school for years, and hopefully still is!

My daughter got a letter back from david walliams. She was obsessed with his books when she was little she also attached a photo with her in one of the characters outfits she wore for world book Day.

She put in the letter what school she went to and he video called her year group a few months later and mentioned her! I know he isn't very popular on here but I do think that was a really nice thing to do.

I sent a message to my mum's favourite singer for her 50th birthday. He replied personally with a message as he'd remembered her from a previous gig. I think it was her best present!

I contacted Rik mayal on Facebook as he and my dfil had been in icu together after his accident and my dfil asked me to find out how he was. To my surprise he answered me put a friends request in and sent a lovely card and flowers when my dfil died. 2 days before he died he sent me a lovely message as I had been going through a bad time and a really bad but funny joke. He was such a lovely genuine man

I wrote to Hilary Mantel telling her how much I had enjoyed reading Wolf Hall and a couple of her other books. She sent me quite a long letter back which was very lovely of her.

As a child I wrote to both Jimmy Saville and Rolf Harris and got lovely responses. Not proud 😬

I wrote to the author Blake Morrison - some personal thoughts and experiences prompted by one of his books. He wrote a long, thoughtful letter back.

😂

Oh some of these are just lovely!

I exchanged quite a few letters with Jacqueline Wilson in the early 00s as a pre-teen. She always wrote beautiful, handwritten letters.

I did, quite a lot. The nicest were Chris Packham and Stephen Fry, with both of whom I had an ongoing correspondence over a period of time.

He replied to my son too! Ds wants to be an animator/ artist so he asked if DW would consider him if he ever got tired of Tony Ross!!! Got a lovely reply about keeping up the hard work and you never know etc.

We are currently waiting on a reply from Warner Bros after sending a movie plot suggestion but I'm not so hopeful

@AceofPentacles Nathan Barley was great! I’ve still got a dvd somewhere. If I remember correctly, the actor was quite handsome too 🍰!

I'm afraid to say that one of my old jobs was writing letters to fans on behalf of several fairly famous authors. And by "on behalf of", I mean "pretending to be them".

I wrote to Richard Adams because I loved his book The Plague Dogs (he also wrote Watership Down). He sent a lovely reply.

When the Duke of Edinburgh died, my mum sent the Queen a little booklet on grief that she'd found helpful when my dad died. She received an unexpected and touching reply.

In the 90s my late great-aunt wrote to Aled Jones about a piece of music he'd sung on Songs of Praise - he sent a lovely response and a copy of the sheet music, both of which my aunt treasured until she passed away.

I used to be a bit of a Stage Door autograph hunter after seeing West End shows. Petula Clark (she was in Sunset Boulevard) I remember as being particularly nice.

I wrote to Robert Graves, author of I Claudius, enclosing some poems, when I was fourteen and he was seventy, and lived in Majorca. Amazing that it got there, really.

He replied , and we corresponded until dementia overtook him.

Thank you, maestro.

The early days of the internet were amazing for this sort of thing. Getting replies from people on Twitter still freaks me out.
When I was a teenager my favourite book was a novel called World Class about tennis players. Sounds odd, but it was a beautiful book. A few years ago I tracked one of the authors down (it was a married couple and the wife has since died) and emailed him to tell him how much I loved his book and got a lovely reply. It was like a voice from my youth.

Goodness , about 35 years ago I wrote to Seamus Heaney, I was studying his poetry for a level English , I really liked it, especially for some reason elergy to a still born child. I guess as my step mother had just sadly suffered from this. Although obvs I didn’t mention this, or my fave. He won the Nobel prize for literature about ten years later in the mid 90s.

he wrote a paragraph back on a plain white postcard, in blue biro, just basically saying he was glad I liked his poems and chuffed I’d be studying him for my exams and wished me luck, which I thought was very sweet of him.

My daughter has written to three authors who have all written back.. one wrote twice and also came to her school for an author visit. We have a beautiful picture of the two of them together.