Caryl Churchill
Caryl Churchill (born 3 September 1938) is an English dramatist known for her use of non-naturalistic techniques and feminist themes, dramatisation of the abuses of power, and exploration of sexual politics.[1] She is acknowledged as a major playwright in the English language and one of world theatre's most influential writers.
Her early work developed Bertolt Brecht's modernist dramatic and theatrical techniques of 'Epic theatre' to explore issues of gender and sexuality. From A Mouthful of Birds (1986) onwards, she began to experiment with forms of dance-theatre, incorporating techniques developed from the performance tradition initiated by Antonin Artaud with his 'Theatre of Cruelty'. This move away from a clear Fabel dramaturgy towards i
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LeAnne Howe
LeAnne Howe is the author of three books, including Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (Aunt Lute Books, 2007), and is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation. In 2006-2007 she was the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi at Oxford. She was the screenwriter for Indian Country Diaries: Spiral of Fire, a 90-minute PBS documentary released in November 2006. Howe's first novel, Shell Shaker (Aunt Lute Books, 2001), received an American Book Award in 2002. Her poetry collection, Evidence of Red (Salt Publishing, UK; 2005), was awarded the 2006 Oklahoma Book Award. Currently, Howe is Associate Professor and Interim Director of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and teaches in t
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Dionne Brand
As a young girl growing up in Trinidad, Dionne Brand submitted poems to the newspapers under the pseudonym Xavier Simone, an homage to Nina Simone, whom she would listen to late at night on the radio. Brand moved to Canada when she was 17 to attend the University of Toronto, where she earned a degree in Philosophy and English, a Masters in the Philosophy of Education and pursued PhD studies in Women’s History but left the program to make time for creative writing.
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Dionne Brand first came to prominence in Canada as a poet. Her books of poetry include No Language Is Neutral, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, and Land to Light On, winner of the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award and thirsty, finalist for the Griffin Pri -
Roy Williams
Born and brought up in Notting Hill, London, Roy Samuel Williams became a full time writer in his 20s after he took a theatre-writing degree at Rose Bruford College. His first full-length play was The No Boys Cricket Club, which premiered in 1996 at Theatre Royal Stratford East, since when he has had plays produced at the Royal Court, The Bush Theatre, The Hampstead Theatre and the National Theatre.
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Williams has done work in television, including adapting his own play Fallout and also co-wrote the script for the 2014 British film Fast Girls. He has also written a police procedural series for BBC Radio The Interrogation.
In 2011, Williams received the best play award for Sucker Punch at the Writers Guild Awards. In 2020, he received an RTS nom -
Alan Rickman
Alan Sidney Patrick Rickman was an Emmy-, Golden Globe-, BAFTA- and Screen Actors Guild Award-winning English film, television and stage actor. He was perhaps best known to American film audiences for his roles as Severus Snape in the Harry Potter films and Hans Gruber in Die Hard.
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Susanna Centlivre
Susanna Centlivre (c. 1667–1670 – 1 December 1723), born Susanna Freeman and also known professionally as Susanna Carroll, was an English poet, actress, and "the most successful female playwright of the eighteenth century".[1] Centlivre's "pieces continued to be acted after the theatre managers had forgotten most of her contemporaries." [2] During a long career at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, she became known as the second woman of the English stage, after Aphra Behn. (Wikipedia)
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Samuel Beckett
Novels of Samuel Barclay Beckett, Irish writer, include Murphy in 1938 and Malone Dies in 1951; a wider audience know his absurdist plays, such as Waiting for Godot in 1952 and Krapp's Last Tape in 1959, and he won the Nobel Prize of 1969 for literature.
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Samuel Barclay Beckett, an avant-garde theater director and poet, lived in France for most of his adult life. He used English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black gallows humor.
People regard most influence of Samuel Barclay Beckett of the 20th century. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce strongly influenced him, whom people consider as one modernist. People sometimes consider him as an inspiration to many later first p -
Angelina Weld Grimké
American journalist, teacher, playwright and poet who came to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance. She was one of the first women of color to have a play publicly performed.
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Not to be confused with her great-aunt Angelina Emily Grimké, an abolitionist author. -
Phoebe Waller-Bridge
Phoebe Mary Waller-Bridge (born 14 July 1985) is an English actress and writer. She is best known for creating, writing and starring in the comedy-drama series Crashing (2016) and Fleabag (2016–19), for which she won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Female Comedy Performance, and for developing and writing the first season of BBC America drama Killing Eve, based on novels by Luke Jennings.
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J.M. Synge
Edmund John Millington Synge (pronounced /sɪŋ/) was an Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore. He was one of the cofounders of the Abbey Theatre. He is best known for the play The Playboy of the Western World, which caused riots during its opening run at the Abbey theatre. Synge wrote many well known plays, including "Riders to the Sea", which is often considered to be his strongest literary work.
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Although he came from an Anglo-Irish background, Synge's writings are mainly concerned with the world of the Roman Catholic peasants of rural Ireland and with what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view. -
Brian Friel
Brian Friel is a playwright and, more recently, director of his own works from Ireland who now resides in County Donegal.
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Friel was born in Omagh County Tyrone, the son of Patrick "Paddy" Friel, a primary school teacher and later a borough councillor in Derry, and Mary McLoone, postmistress of Glenties, County Donegal (Ulf Dantanus provides the most detail regarding Friel's parents and grandparents, see Books below). He received his education at St. Columb's College in Derry and the seminary at St. Patrick's College, Maynooth (1945-48) from which he received his B.A., then he received his teacher's training at St. Mary's Training College in Belfast, 1949-50. He married Anne Morrison in 1954, with whom he has four daughters and one son; they -
Gary Owen
Gary Owen is a Welsh playwright and screenwriter. His recent plays include Violence and Son which had its premiere at the Royal Court in June 2015, and Iphigenia in Splott for which he won the James Tait Black Prize for Drama.
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His other works include Love Steals Us From Loneliness, Crazy Gary's Mobile Disco, The Shadow of a Boy, (winner of Meyer Whitworth and George Devine awards), The Drowned World (winner of Fringe First and Pearson Best Play awards), Ghost City, Cancer Time, SK8, Big Hopes, In the Pipeline, Blackthorn, Mary Twice, Amgen:Broken, Bulletproof, and Free Folk. His adaptations include Spring Awakening and Ring Ring, a new version of La Ronde, for the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama; and Dickens' A Christmas Carol for Sh -
Florian Zeller
Florian Zeller is a French novelist and playwright. His work has been translated into a dozen languages, including English. He won the Prix Interallié in 2004 for his novel "Fascination of Evil" ("La Fascination du Pire").
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Madhuri Shekar
Madhuri Shekar was born in California and grew up in India, and after a couple of quick detours in Singapore and London, made her first grown-up home in Los Angeles. She currently shuttles between Jersey City, Los Angeles and Chennai.
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Her new audio play EVIL EYE debuted on the Audible best-seller list in May 2019. Her play HOUSE OF JOY will be getting its world premiere at Cal Shakes in August 2019. Also upcoming in the 2019/2020 season is her new commission from Victory Gardens, DHABA ON DEVON AVENUE.
Her play QUEEN had its World Premiere in April 2017 at Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago, and was nominated for a Jeff Award for Best New Play. In 2018 it was produced in Seattle (Pratidhwani with ACT) and the Bay Area (EnActe Theatre), and ha -
Sarah Daniels
Sarah Daniels (born November 1956 in London [1]) is a British dramatist. She has been a prolific writer since her first professionally performed play, Ripen Our Darkness, was given a production at the Royal Court in 1981.
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Mike Bartlett
Michael Bartlett is a British playwright. Mike Bartlett was born on 7 October 1980 in Abingdon, Oxford, England. He attended Abingdon School, then studied English and Theatre Studies at the University of Leeds. In October 2013, Mike won Best New Play at The National Theatre Awards for his play Bull, beating plays from both Alan Ayckbourn and Tom Wells.
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(source) -
Suzan-Lori Parks
Suzan-Lori Parks is an award-winning American playwright and screenwriter. She was a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 2001, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002. She is married to blues musician Paul Oscher.
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Marina Carr
Marina Carr was brought up in County Offaly. A graduate of University College Dublin, she has written extensively for the theatre. She has taught at Villanova, Princeton, and currently teaches in the School of English, Dublin City University. Awards include the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Macaulay Fellowship, the E. M. Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Wyndham Campbell Prize. She lives in Dublin with her husband and four children.
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Peter Shaffer
Sir Peter Levin Shaffer was an English dramatist, author of numerous award-winning plays, several of which have been filmed.
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See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sh... -
Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott was a Caribbean poet, playwright, writer and visual artist. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 "for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment."
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His work, which developed independently of the schools of magic realism emerging in both South America and Europe at around the time of his birth, is intensely related to the symbolism of myth and its relationship to culture. He was best known for his epic poem Omeros, a reworking of Homeric story and tradition into a journey around the Caribbean and beyond to the American West and London.
Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, which has produced his plays (and o -
Emily Steel
Winner: Best Theatre Award, Adelaide Fringe 2017.
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Winner: Weekly John Chataway Innovation Award, Adelaide Fringe 2017
Finalist: Ruby Awards 2017, Best Work
Finalist: Ruby Awards 2017, Arts Innovation and Enterprise
Finalist: Adelaide Critics Circle Awards 2017, Award for Innovation
Finalist: Jill Blewett Playwright’s Award, Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature 2018 -
Howard Barker
Howard Barker is an English playwright. His plays have been produced at the Royal Court, the RSC and the National Theatre, throughout Europe and the USA and by his own company, The Wrestling School. He is best known as the exponent of the Theatre of Catastrophe. He is a theatre theorist, a poet and a painter. His work has been the subject of a number of book-length studies and academic conferences.
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Georg Kaiser
Friedrich Carl Georg Kaiser, called Georg Kaiser, (November 25, 1878 – June 4, 1945) was a German dramatist.
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He was highly prolific and wrote in a number of different styles. An Expressionist dramatist, he was, along with Gerhart Hauptmann, the most frequently performed playwright in the Weimar Republic. Georg Kaiser's plays include The Burghers of Calais (1913), From Morn to Midnight (1912), and a trilogy, comprising The Coral (1917), Gas (1918), Gas II (1920).
He died at Ascona, Switzerland.
The Burghers of Calais (Die Bürger von Calais), written in 1913, was not performed until 1917. It was Kaiser's first success. The play is very dense linguistically, with its dialogue comprising numerous emotive monologues influenced by the Telegramstil p -
George Elliott Clarke
A seventh-generation Nova Scotian, George Elliott Clarke was born in 1960 in Windsor Plans, Nova Scotia. He is known as a poet, as well as for his two-volume anthology of Black Writing from Nova Scotia, Fire in the Water. Volume One contains spirituals, poety sermons, and accounts from 1789 to the mid-twentieth century; Volume Two collects the work of the Black Cultural Renaissance in Nova Scotia, which, in Clarke's words, "speaks to people everywhere about overcoming hardships and liberating the spirit." Currently on faculty at Duke University, he is now writing both a play and an opera on slavery in Nova Scotia, a reformulation of Shelley's The Cenci. He has won many awards including the 1981 Prize for Adult Poetry from the Writers Federa
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Lucy Prebble
Lucy Prebble is a British playwright. She is the author of the plays The Sugar Syndrome, The Effect and ENRON, and adaptation writer of the television series Secret Diary of a Call Girl.
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T.W. Robertson
Thomas William Robertson (9 January 1829 – 3 February 1871), usually known professionally as T. W. Robertson, was an English dramatist and innovative stage director best known for a series of realistic or naturalistic plays produced in London in the 1860s that broke new ground and inspired playwrights such as W.S. Gilbert and George Bernard Shaw.
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Stephen Karam
Stephen Karam is the author of Sons of the Prophet, a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and the recipient of the 2012 Drama Critics Circle, Outer Critics Circle, Lucille Lortel and Hull-Warriner Awards for Best Play. His other play is Speech & Debate, the inaugural production of Roundabout Underground; columbinus (New York Theatre Workshop). He wrote the libretto for Dark Sisters, an original chamber opera with composer Nico Muhly (co-produced by Gotham Chamber Opera, MTG and Opera Company of Philadelphia).
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Walter Greenwood
Greenwood was born in Hanky Park, in Pendleton, Salford, Lancashire, the son of radical working class parents. His father died when he was nine, and his mother supported him by working as a waitress. Like many children he left school at the age of 13 to work (as a pawnbroker's clerk). He took a succession of low paid jobs, and continued to educate himself in Salford Public Library. During periods of unemployment he worked for the local Labour Party and began to write short stories.
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While unemployed, he wrote his first novel, Love on the Dole, in 1932. It was about the destructive social effects of poverty in his home town. After several rejections, it was published in 1933. It was a critical and commercial success, and a huge influence on th -
Elizabeth Cary
Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, nee Tanfield, was an English poet, translator, and dramatist. Precocious and studious, she was known from a young age for her learning and knowledge of languages.
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Works
The mirror of the world, a translation of Abraham Ortelius's Le mirroir du monde (1598)
The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (pub. 1613)
Reply of the most Illustrious Cardinal of Perron (1630)
The History of the Life, Reign and Death of Edward II, or The History of the most Unfortunate Prince, King Edward II (pub. 1680) -
Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard was an American artist who worked as an award-winning playwright, writer and actor. His many written works are known for being frank and often absurd, as well as for having an authentic sense of the style and sensibility of the gritty modern American west. He was an actor of the stage and motion pictures; a director of stage and film; author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs; and a musician.
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Gao Xingjian
Gao Xingjian is a Chinese-born novelist, playwright, critic, and painter. An émigré to France since 1987, Gao was granted French citizenship in 1997. The recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature, he is also a noted translator (particularly of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco), screenwriter, stage director, and a celebrated painter.
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Anthony Neilson
Anthony Neilson (born 1967) is a Scottish playwright and director. He is known for his collabo rative way of writing and workshopping his plays. Much of his work is characterised by the exploration of sex and violence.
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Neilson has been cited as a key figure of In-yer-face theatre, a term used to characterise new plays with a confrontational style and sensibility that emerged in British theatre during the 1990s. He has been credited with coining the phrase "in-your-face theatre" but has rejected the label and instead describes his work as “'experiential' theatre”. -
John Mandeville
"Jehan de Mandeville", translated as "Sir John Mandeville", is the name claimed by the compiler of a singular book of supposed travels, written in Anglo-Norman French, and published between 1357 and 1371.
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By aid of translations into many other languages it acquired extraordinary popularity. Despite the extremely unreliable and often fantastical nature of the travels it describes, it was used as a work of reference — Christopher Columbus, for example, was heavily influenced by both this work and Marco Polo's earlier Il Milione (Adams 53). -
Michaela Coel
Michaela Ewuraba Boakye-Collinson (1 October 1987), known professionally as Michaela Coel, is a British actress, screenwriter, singer, songwriter, poet, and playwright. In 2016, she won the BAFTA for Best Female Performance in a Comedy Programme and Breakthrough Talent for the television series Chewing Gum, which she created, wrote and acted as the lead role.
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Marsha Norman
Marsha Norman is an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. She received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play 'night, Mother. She wrote the book and lyrics for such Broadway musicals as The Secret Garden, for which she won a Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical, and The Red Shoes, as well as the libretto for the musical The Color Purple and the book for the musical The Bridges of Madison County. She was co-chair of the playwriting department at The Juilliard School until stepping down in 2020.
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Duncan Macmillan
This page is for the English playwright. For the Scottish art historian, see Duncan Macmillan.
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Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.
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Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeli -
Sarah Kane
Sarah Kane was an English playwright. Her plays deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture—both physical and psychological—and death. They are characterised by a poetic intensity, pared-down language, exploration of theatrical form, and, in her earlier work, the use of stylized violent stage action. Kane battled with depression, and her life was brought to a premature end when she committed suicide at London's King's College Hospital. Her published work consists of five plays and one short film, Skin.
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T.S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry." He wrote the poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot was born an American, moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at the age of 25), and became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39.
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See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.S._Eliot -
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Salman Rushdie
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British and American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, typically set on the Indian subcontinent. Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize.
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After his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie became the subject of several assassination attempts and death threats, including a fatwa calling for his death issued by Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran. In total, 20 countries bann -
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Mark Ravenhill
Mark Ravenhill (born 7 June 1966) is an English playwright, actor and journalist.
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His plays include Shopping and Fucking (first performed in 1996), Some Explicit Polaroids (1999) and Mother Clap's Molly House (2001). He made his acting debut in his monologue Product, at the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. He often writes for the arts section of The Guardian. He is Associate Director of London's Little Opera House at The King's Head Theatre. -
Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964) and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993) and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' works.
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Martin Crimp
Martin Andrew Crimp (born 14 February 1956 in Dartford, Kent) is a British playwright.
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Crimp is sometimes described as a practitioner of the "in-yer-face" school of contemporary British drama, although he rejects the label. He is notable for the astringency of his dialogue, a tone of emotional detachment, a bleak view of human relationships – none of his characters experience love or joy – and latterly, a concern for theatrical form and language rather than an interest in narrative. -
Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.
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Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeli -
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
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Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, W -
Salman Rushdie
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British and American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, typically set on the Indian subcontinent. Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize.
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After his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie became the subject of several assassination attempts and death threats, including a fatwa calling for his death issued by Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran. In total, 20 countries bann -
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
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Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth, Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and Joh -
Diana Wynne Jones
Diana Wynne Jones was a celebrated British writer best known for her inventive and influential works of fantasy for children and young adults. Her stories often combined magical worlds with science fiction elements, parallel universes, and a sharp sense of humor. Among her most beloved books are Howl's Moving Castle, the Chrestomanci series, The Dalemark Quartet, Dark Lord of Derkholm, and the satirical The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Her work gained renewed attention and readership with the popularity of the Harry Potter series, to which her books have frequently been compared.
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Admired by authors such as Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, and J.K. Rowling, Jones was a major influence on the landscape of modern fantasy. She received numerous a -
Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott was a Caribbean poet, playwright, writer and visual artist. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 "for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment."
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His work, which developed independently of the schools of magic realism emerging in both South America and Europe at around the time of his birth, is intensely related to the symbolism of myth and its relationship to culture. He was best known for his epic poem Omeros, a reworking of Homeric story and tradition into a journey around the Caribbean and beyond to the American West and London.
Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, which has produced his plays (and o -
Elizabeth Cary
Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, nee Tanfield, was an English poet, translator, and dramatist. Precocious and studious, she was known from a young age for her learning and knowledge of languages.
Buy books on Amazon
Works
The mirror of the world, a translation of Abraham Ortelius's Le mirroir du monde (1598)
The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (pub. 1613)
Reply of the most Illustrious Cardinal of Perron (1630)
The History of the Life, Reign and Death of Edward II, or The History of the most Unfortunate Prince, King Edward II (pub. 1680) -
Andrea Levy
Andrea Levy was an English novelist, born in London to Jamaican parents. Her novels chronicled the experiences of the post-World War II generation of Jamaican immigrants in Britain. She was one of the first black British authors to achieve both critical and commercial success. Her novel Small Island won several major literary prizes: the Orange Prize for women's fiction, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year award.
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Librarian's note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. -
Bertolt Brecht
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director. A seminal theatre practitioner of the twentieth century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the Berliner Ensemble—the post-war theatre company operated by Brecht and his wife and long-time collaborator, the actress Helene Weigel—with its internationally acclaimed productions.
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From his late twenties Brecht remained a life-long committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his 'epic theatre', synthesized and extended the experiments of Piscator and Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political -
Sarah Kane
Sarah Kane was an English playwright. Her plays deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture—both physical and psychological—and death. They are characterised by a poetic intensity, pared-down language, exploration of theatrical form, and, in her earlier work, the use of stylized violent stage action. Kane battled with depression, and her life was brought to a premature end when she committed suicide at London's King's College Hospital. Her published work consists of five plays and one short film, Skin.
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Sylvia Townsend Warner
Sylvia Townsend Warner was born at Harrow on the Hill, the only child of George Townsend Warner and his wife Eleanora (Nora) Hudleston. Her father was a house-master at Harrow School and was, for many years, associated with the prestigious Harrow History Prize which was renamed the Townsend Warner History Prize in his honor, after his death in 1916. As a child, Sylvia seemingly enjoyed an idyllic childhood in rural Devonshire, but was strongly affected by her father's death.
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She moved to London and worked in a munitions factory at the outbreak of World War I. She was friendly with a number of the "Bright Young Things" of the 1920s. Her first major success was the novel Lolly Willowes. In 1923 Warner met T. F. Powys whose writing influenced h -
Dario Fo
Dario Fo was an Italian satirist, playwright, theatre director, actor, and composer. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. In 2007 he was ranked Joint Seventh with Stephen Hawking in The Telegraph's list of 100 greatest living geniuses. His dramatic work employed comedic methods of the ancient Italian commedia dell'arte, a theatrical style popular with the proletarian classes. He owned and operated a theatre company with his wife, the leading actress Franca Rame. Dario Fo died in Milan on October 13th 2016, at the age of 90.
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Carol Ann Duffy
Dame Carol Ann Duffy, DBE, FRSL is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009.
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She is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly LGBT person to hold this position.
Her collections include Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award; and Rapture (2005), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize.
Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence, in an accessible language that has made them popular in schools. -
Duncan Macmillan
This page is for the English playwright. For the Scottish art historian, see Duncan Macmillan.
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Susanna Centlivre
Susanna Centlivre (c. 1667–1670 – 1 December 1723), born Susanna Freeman and also known professionally as Susanna Carroll, was an English poet, actress, and "the most successful female playwright of the eighteenth century".[1] Centlivre's "pieces continued to be acted after the theatre managers had forgotten most of her contemporaries." [2] During a long career at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, she became known as the second woman of the English stage, after Aphra Behn. (Wikipedia)
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Lynn Nottage
Lynn Nottage is an American playwright whose work often deals with the lives of marginalized people. She is a professor of Playwriting at Columbia University. She was the first woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice; the first in 2009 for Ruined, and the second in 2017 for Sweat.
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Samuel Beckett
Novels of Samuel Barclay Beckett, Irish writer, include Murphy in 1938 and Malone Dies in 1951; a wider audience know his absurdist plays, such as Waiting for Godot in 1952 and Krapp's Last Tape in 1959, and he won the Nobel Prize of 1969 for literature.
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Samuel Barclay Beckett, an avant-garde theater director and poet, lived in France for most of his adult life. He used English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black gallows humor.
People regard most influence of Samuel Barclay Beckett of the 20th century. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce strongly influenced him, whom people consider as one modernist. People sometimes consider him as an inspiration to many later first p -
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский (Russian)
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Works, such as the novels Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), of Russian writer Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky or Dostoevski combine religious mysticism with profound psychological insight.
Very influential writings of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin included Problems of Dostoyevsky's Works (1929),
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky composed short stories, essays, and journals. His literature explores humans in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century and engages with a variety of philosophies and themes. People most acclaimed his Demons(1872) .
Many literary critics rate him among the greatest authors of worl -
Annie Baker
Baker grew up in Amherst, Mass., and graduated from the Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She earned her MFA from Brooklyn College.
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Her play Body Awareness was staged off-Broadway by the Atlantic Theater Company in May and June 2008. The play featured JoBeth Williams and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award. Circle Mirror Transformation premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in October 2009 and received Obie Awards for Best New American Play and Performance, Ensemble. Her play The Aliens, which premiered off-Broadway at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in April 2010, was a finalist for the 2010 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and shared the 2010 Obie Award f -
J.M. Synge
Edmund John Millington Synge (pronounced /sɪŋ/) was an Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore. He was one of the cofounders of the Abbey Theatre. He is best known for the play The Playboy of the Western World, which caused riots during its opening run at the Abbey theatre. Synge wrote many well known plays, including "Riders to the Sea", which is often considered to be his strongest literary work.
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Although he came from an Anglo-Irish background, Synge's writings are mainly concerned with the world of the Roman Catholic peasants of rural Ireland and with what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view. -
W.G. Sebald
Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald was a German writer and academic. His works are largely concerned with the themes of memory, loss of memory, and identity (both personal and collective) and decay (of civilizations, traditions or physical objects). They are, in particular, attempts to reconcile himself with, and deal in literary terms with, the trauma of the Second World War and its effect on the German people.
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At the time of his death at the age of only 57, he was being cited by many literary critics as one of the greatest living authors, and was tipped as a possible future recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. -
Phoebe Waller-Bridge
Phoebe Mary Waller-Bridge (born 14 July 1985) is an English actress and writer. She is best known for creating, writing and starring in the comedy-drama series Crashing (2016) and Fleabag (2016–19), for which she won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Female Comedy Performance, and for developing and writing the first season of BBC America drama Killing Eve, based on novels by Luke Jennings.
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Shelagh Delaney
A British playwright, best known for her debut work, A Taste of Honey.
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Wakefield Master
The Wakefield Mystery Play cycle is the work of many authors, some sourced from the York Cycle. However, the most significant contribution has been attributed to an anonymous author known as the "Wakefield Master." It is believed that his additions include Noah, The First Shepherds' Play, The Second Shepherds' Play, Herod the Great and The Buffeting of Christ. This common authorship is suspected due to a unique thirteen-line rhymed stanza, which is evident in all five texts.
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The term "Wakefield Master" emerged from a need to distinguish some material in the Towneley manuscript from a mass of unexceptional material, and was first coined by Charles Mills Gayley. In 1903, Gayley and Alwin Thaler published an anthology of criticism and dramatic -
Jerzy Grotowski
Jerzy Grotowski was a Polish theatre director and innovator of experimental theatre, the "theatre laboratory" and "poor theatre" concepts.
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MJ Kaufman
MJ Kaufman is a playwright and television writer from Portland, OR. Their plays have been seen at the Public Theater, WP Theater, National Asian American Theater Company, Clubbed Thumb, Colt Coeur, Williamstown Theater Festival, InterAct Theater, Yale School of Drama and numerous other theaters and schools around the country as well as in Russian in Moscow and in Australia. Their work has been developed by the Lark Play Development Center, the Playwrights Realm, Page73 and New York Theater Workshop among others.
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MJ received the 2017 Helen Merrill Emerging Writers Award, 2013 ASCAP Cole Porter Prize in Playwriting, the 2013 Global Age Project Prize, and the 2010 Jane Chambers Prize in Feminist Theatre. MJ has held residencies at the New Museu -
David Ball
David Ball has been to 60 countries on six continents. He has lived and worked in various parts of Africa. In the course of researching his novel Empires of Sand, he crossed the Sahara desert four times, and got lost there only once. Research trips for other novels have taken him to China, Istanbul, Algeria, and Malta - a little island where so far he hasn't gotten lost at all.
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A former pilot, sarcophagus maker, and businessman, David has driven a taxi in New York City and built a road in West Africa. He installed telecommunications equipment in Cameroun and explored the Andes in a Volkswagen bus. He has renovated old Victorian houses in Denver and pumped gasoline in the Grand Tetons.
He has a master's degree in journalism from Columbia Unive -
Joseph Stein
Born in New York City to Jewish parents, Charles and Emma (Rosenblum) Stein, who had immigrated from Poland, Stein grew up in the Bronx. He graduated in 1935 from CCNY, with a B.S. degree, then earned a Master of Social Work degree from Columbia University in 1937. He began his career as a psychiatric social worker from 1939 until 1945, while writing comedy on the side.
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A chance encounter with Zero Mostel led him to start writing for radio personalities, including Henry Morgan, Hildegarde, Tallulah Bankhead, Phil Silvers, and Jackie Gleason. He later started working in television for Sid Caesar when he joined the writing team of Your Show of Shows that included Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Neil Simon. -
Victoria Benedictsson
See also pseudonym: Ernst Ahlgren
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Victoria Benedictsson (March 6, 1850, Domme – July 21, 1888) was a Swedish author. She was born as Victoria Maria Bruzelius in Domme, a village in the province of Skåne. She wrote under the pen name Ernst Ahlgren.
Benedictsson grew up on a farm in Sweden. At 21 she married a 49-year-old widower from Hörby. Benedictsson was not happy in her marriage and had a love affair with the Danish critic and scholar Georg Brandes. The unhappy love affair has often been blamed for her subsequent suicide, but she was also very unhappy with the intellectually limited life she led. She is, together with August Strindberg, regarded as one of the greatest proponents of the Swedish realist writing style. In her novels she descr -
Willy Russell
William Russell is a British dramatist, lyricist, and composer. His best-known works are Educating Rita, Shirley Valentine, and Blood Brothers.
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Willy Russell was born in Whiston, on the outskirts of Liverpool, where he grew up. His parents worked in a book publisher's and often encouraged him to read. After leaving school with one O-level in English, he first became a ladies' hairdresser and ran his own salon. Russell then undertook a variety of jobs, also the first play he wrote was Keep Your Eyes Down Low (1975). His first success was a play about The Beatles called John, Paul, George, Ringo … and Bert. Originally commissioned for the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool was transferring to the West End in 1974. Educating Rita (1980) concerned a fe -
Yoshi Oida
The Japanese actor, director and teacher, Yoshi Oida, has created his own acting style, after years of performance with the theatre icon Peter Brook. As part of Brook`s International Theatre Group, Yoshi Oida performed on various stages all over the world. Several years ago he began directing plays himself using a unique combination of Eastern and Western approaches to theatre.
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C.P. Taylor
Cecil Philip Taylor, usually credited as C.P. Taylor, was a Scottish playwright. He wrote almost 80 plays during his 16 years as a professional playwright, including several for radio and television. He also made a number of documentary programmes for the BBC. His plays tended to draw on his Jewish background and his Socialist Marxist viewpoint, and to be written in dialect.
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Source: Wikipedia -
Alexander Zeldin
Alexander Zeldin is a writer and director for theatre. He trained on the Jerwood Young Directors course at The Old Vic and has taken part in residencies at the Egyptian Centre for Culture and Art and at Studio Emad Eddin in Cairo. His critically-acclaimed play, Beyond Caring, which examined the effects of zero hours contracts had its World Premiere at The Yard Theatre in Hackney in 2014, before transferring to the Temporary Theatre at the National Theatre in London in 2015. In 2015, Alex was the recipient of The Quercus Trust Award and was appointed as Associate Director at The Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Beyond Caring toured the UK in 2016 and his play LOVE opened at the National Theatre.
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David Harrower
David Harrower is a Scottish playwright, who, as of of 2005, lives in Glasgow. His first play, Knives in Hens, which premiered at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 1995, was considered a critical and popular success.
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Jordan Tannahill
Jordan Tannahill is a Canadian novelist and playwright based in London.
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His debut novel, Liminal, won France's 2021 Prix des Jeunes Libraires. His second novel, The Listeners, was a Canadian bestseller, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Giller Prize.
Tannahill is the author of several plays, and the book of essays, Theatre of the Unimpressed.
In 2019, CBC Arts named Tannahill as one of sixty-nine LGBTQ Canadians, living or deceased, who has shaped the country's history. -
Joe Orton
John Kingsley ("Joe") Orton was an English playwright. In a short but prolific career lasting from 1964 until his death in 1967, he shocked, outraged, and amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies. The adjective Ortonesque is now used to refer to something characterised by a dark but farcical cynicism.
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Joe Orton began to write plays in the early 1960s. He wrote his only novel: posthumously published as Head to Toe, in 1959, and had his writing accepted soon afterward. In 1963 the BBC paid £65 for the radio play The Ruffian on the Stair, broadcast on 31 August 1964. It was substantially rewritten for the stage in 1966.
Orton had completed Entertaining Mr. Sloane by the time Ruffian was broadcast. The play premiered on 6 May 1964 dire -
Shelagh Stephenson
Shelagh Stephenson was born in Northumberland and read drama at Manchester University. She has written several original plays for BBC Radio. These include Darling Peidi, about the Thompson and Bywater murder case, which was broadcast in the Monday Play series in 1993; a Saturday Night Theatre, The Anatomical Venus, broadcast in the following year; and Five Kinds of Silence (1996), which won the Writer's Guild Award for Best Original Drama. Her first stage play, The Memory of Water, opened at the Hampstead Theatre, London, in July 1996, and her second, An Experiment With An Air Pump, joint winner of the 1997 Peggy Ramsay Award, opened at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in February 1998. Also Life is a Dream, and Through a Glass Darkl
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Simon Goldhill
Simon David Goldhil is Professor in Greek literature and culture and fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at King's College, Cambridge. He was previously Director of Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge, succeeding Mary Jacobus in October 2011. He is best known for his work on Greek tragedy.
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In 2009, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2010, he was appointed as the John Harvard Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Cambridge, a research position held concurrently with his chair in Greek.
In 2016, he became a fellow of the British Academy. He is a member of the Council of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Board o -
Jonathan Bate
Jonathan Bate CBE FBA FRSL is an English academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, novelist and scholar of Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is also Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Provost of Worcester College, Oxford. A Man Booker Prize judge in 2014.
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He studied at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University. He has been King Alfred Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University, Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick. He is married to author and biographer Paula Byrne. He has also written one novel, The Cure for Love. -
Jo Clifford
Jo Clifford is one of the generation of Scottish playwrights who put the Traverse on the international theatrical map in the late 1980s with her Losing Venice, Lucy’s Play, Playing with Fire, Ines de Castro and Light in the Village. With her Great Expectations she became the first openly trans playwright to have a play running in London’s West End.
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James McMillan wrote the music to transform her Ines de Castro into an opera (Scottish Opera/Edinburgh International Festival). Other work for the Edinburgh International Festival includes Schism in England (National Theatre of Great Britain), Anna (Traverse Theatre), Life is a Dream (The Lyceum, Edinburgh) and Celestina (Birmingham Rep).
Other translations and adaptations include Faust Parts 1 & 2 -
D.M. Thomas
D.M. Thomas was born in Cornwall in 1935. After reading English at New College, Oxford, he became a teacher and was Head of the English Department at Hereford College of Education until he became a full-time writer. His first novel The Flute-Player won the Gollancz Pan/Picador Fantasy Competition. He is also known for his collections of verse and his translation from the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova.
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He was awarded the Los Angeles Fiction prize for his novel The White Hotel, an international bestseller, translated into 30 languages; a Cholmondeley award for poetry; and the Orwell Prize for his biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He lives in his native Cornwall, England. -
Rachel Corrie
Early life
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Corrie was born on April 10, 1979, and raised in Olympia, Washington, United States. She was the youngest of the three children of Craig Corrie, an insurance executive, and Cindy Corrie. Cindy describes their family as "average Americans—politically liberal, economically conservative, middle class".[5][6][7]
After graduating from Capital High School, Corrie went on to attend The Evergreen State College (TESC), also in Olympia, where she took a number of arts courses. She took one year off from her studies to work as a volunteer in the Washington State Conservation Corps; other volunteer work included making weekly visits to patients with mental disorders for three years.[7] In her senior year, she proposed an independent-study prog -
Grace Nichols
Grace Nichols was born in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1950 and grew up in a small country village on the Guyanese coast. She moved to the city with her family when she was eight, an experience central to her first novel, Whole of a Morning Sky (1986), set in 1960s Guyana in the middle of the country's struggle for independence.
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She worked as a teacher and journalist and, as part of a Diploma in Communications at the University of Guyana, spent time in some of the most remote areas of Guyana, a period that influenced her writings and initiated a strong interest in Guyanese folk tales, Amerindian myths and the South American civilisations of the Aztec and Inca. She has lived in the UK since 1977.
Her first poetry collection, I is a Long-Memoried Wom -
George Lillo
George Lillo (3 February 1691 – 4 September 1739)[1] was an English playwright and tragedian. He was a jeweller in London as well as a dramatist. He produced his first stage work, Silvia, or The Country Burial, in 1730. A year later, he produced his most famous play, The London Merchant. He wrote at least six more plays before his death in 1739, including The Christian Hero (1735), Fatal Curiosity (1737) and Marina (1738).[2]
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Contents
Life
George Lillo was born in Moorfields, or Moorgate, in the City of London.[3] He became a partner in his father’s goldsmith-jewellery business.[2]
Early stage works
Lillo wrote at least eight plays between 1730 and his death in 1739. His first work in the theatre was the ballad opera Silvia, or The Country Buria