Caroline Bird is an award-winning poet and playwright. She won The Forward Prize for best poetry collection in 2020, and was shortlisted for the Costa Prize 2020, the TS Eliot Prize 2017, the Ted Hughes Award 2017, and the Dylan Thomas Prize twice in 2008 and 2010. She was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize 2014. She was the youngest ever member of the Royal Court Young Writer's Programme, tutored by Simon Stephens. Her plays include: Red Ellen (Northern Stage, Nottingham Playhouse & Royal Lyceum Edinburgh, 2022); The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Northern Stage, 2015); Chamber Piece (Lyric Theatre Hammersmith, as part of the Secret Theatre season, 2013); and The Trojan Women (Gate Theatre, 2012). Her Beano-inspired musical, The Trial of Dennis the Menace, was performed in the Purcell Room at the Southbank Centre in 2012. She was short-listed for Most Promising New Playwright at the 2013 Off-West-End Awards.
Lulu Raczka is an award-winning young playwright and Company Director of Barrel Organ Theatre, who she worked with on her play NOTHING. In the past she has been a contributor to Exeunt Theatre Magazine. Lulu is currently under commission to the Gate Theatre, and working on a second project with Barrel Organ.
Suhayla El-Bushra writes for stage and screen. She was writer in residence at the National Theatre, London, where her adaptation of Nikolai Erdman's The Suicide was staged in the Lyttelton Theatre. Other stage work includes: Pigeons (Royal Court, 2013 and tour), Cuckoo (Unicorn Theatre, 2014), The Kilburn Passion (Tricycle, 2014), Arabian Nights (Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, 2017) and an adaptation of Andrea Levy's The Long Song (Chichester Festival Theatre, 2021). Screen credits include two series of Channel 4's Ackley Bridge, Becoming Elizabeth (The Forge/Starz Channel) and a short film for Film4.
Andrea Levy (1956–2019) was an English author best known for the novels Small Island (2004) and The Long Song (2010). She was born in London to Jamaican parents, and her work explores topics related to British Jamaicans and how they negotiate racial, cultural and national identities.
