Notable for his uncompromising honesty and a wit both fierce and fearless, Simon Gray's voice was uniquely his own - intelligent, probing and often outrageously funny. He faced life - and death - with unflinching courage and defiant humanity; even when writing about his own mortality, he lost none of his prodigious talent to entertain.

Warm, candid and with a double dose of dark humour, this dramatisation of Gray's The Smoking Diaries and other memoirs was completed just before his death last summer. The Last Cigarette premiered at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester in March 2009.