Sarah Dollard

Born: 21st January 1980
Episodes Broadcast: 2015, 2017

Biography

Born in Sydney, Australia, Sarah Dollard became a great fan of telefantasy series, including Doctor Who, during her youth. Academically accomplished, she attended the University of Melbourne where her studies included film and television. Dollard came to realise that her passion lay with scriptwriting, and she completed a related diploma at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. In 2005, she earned a trainee position on the soap opera Neighbours; she wound up writing nearly forty episodes, in addition to serving in various other script-related capacities. Dollard also worked on the children's series Li'l Larikkins and The Saddle Club before immigrating to the United Kingdom in 2008. There she hoped to become involved with a programme that had the scale and ambition of Doctor Who's twenty-first-century revival, which was beyond the scope of the Australian television industry.

Dollard quickly established a career for herself in Britain, first developing storylines for Casualty before taking posts as an assistant script editor on Merlin and as a script editor on Primeval and Stella. Frequent Doctor Who contributor Toby Whithouse invited her to write a 2013 episode of Being Human and a 2014 installment of The Game, after which she also contributed to You, Me And The Apocalypse and created the Welsh-language sitcom Cara Fi, on which she was an executive producer. Dollard then achieved her ambition of writing for Doctor Who, with 2015's Face The Raven killing off companion Clara Oswald -- sort of. A second script for Peter Capaldi's Twelfth Doctor followed, in the form of 2017's Thin Ice. Dollard went on to write for shows such as Bridgerton, on which she was also a producer, and A Discovery Of Witches.

Credits
Writer
Face The Raven
Thin Ice

Updated 9th February 2023