A debut foray into the world of romantic fiction has opened an exciting new chapter in the life of an established Angus film producer.
For almost two decades Nick Osborne’s role behind the camera has taken him into professional contact with big-screen names including one-time James Bond Pierce Brosnan and Twilight heartthrob Robert Pattinson.
Now, however, the son of Angus Lord Lieutenant Georgiana Osborne and her husband, James, has fulfilled a long-held ambition of bringing his talents to print in a first book which is riding high in reader charts.
His self-published novel, Refuge, has spent the last couple of weeks in the top 50 literary fiction books on Kindle in the US and received glowing acclaim on the Amazon website for its portrayal of the love story that develops between an American aid worker and an Afghan refugee.
Schooled in Forfar, Nick went south to Winchester College before embarking on an adventure as an 18-year-old to Peshawar, Pakistan.
He taught Pakistani children and Afghan refugees before returning to university at Oxford to study politics, philosophy and economics.
He said: ”After Oxford, I had a burning desire to be in the film industry and so I applied and received a place at the Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.”
His intention was to study for two years and return to the UK to develop his skills, but 17 years later Nick is still based in Los Angeles, has been a film executive and producer and worked on numerous exciting Hollywood projects.
They include the 2010 romantic drama Remember Me, starring Pattinson and Brosnan, but the ambition to pen a novel continued to burn.
He added: ”About five years ago three things began to coincide. Firstly, I increasingly wanted to write I loved producing but it also frustrated me.
”But, bizarrely, because I wasn’t confident in my writing ability, I thought I would write a novel, not a screenplay.”
He chose his favoured genre of love stories.
He added: ”I came back to my time in Pakistan and asked myself, what if I told a simple story a love story set in 1991 between an American aid worker and a young female Afghan refugee.
”What I loved about the idea was that in all great romances there has to be something standing in the way of your couple getting together.
”I think one of the issues of writing a great romance nowadays is that there are so few barriers to love, but there are plenty when your characters are a Muslim woman and an American man, especially if they live in one of the most fundamentalist parts of the world.”
Nick continued: ”Writing the novel was one of the hardest and most rewarding things I’ve ever done it’s a bit like aid work, actually.”
He plans Refuge to be the first in a series of three books and has said work on the second novel is well advanced.