Be an Angel!

How it works

Help us ‘buy time’ for struggling new playwrights to write!

Since 2008, The Adopt a Playwright Award has been gathering individual donors together to help playwrights of quality, who have had at least one play staged and come from backgrounds that offer little encouragement or financial support, to find the time and financial backing to go on writing and take their place among our culture’s storytellers.

The Adopt a Playwright Award was launched in 2008 because it seemed to us that there were no schemes that saved penniless playwrights of quality at the beginning of their careers from giving up and getting a 'proper job' so we shaped this award to be as close and as supportive as each playwright needs us to be. Since then, over £200,000 has been raised and 47 playwrights supported. We start by asking for recommendations in October/November and gather a ‘family’ of individual donors together to raise £10,000 per year …..

Kenny Emson

Ryan Calais Cameron

Without this award I have no idea where I would be. Or what I would be doing. But I know I would be half the writer I am now."

Thanks to you I gained an agent and there is just no way I would have been able to afford the time and research needed to complete Retrograde without this award.

find out more...

Without this award I have no idea where I would be. Or what I would be doing. But I know I would be half the writer I am now.”
Kenny Emson

Be an Angel

Help us ‘buy time’ for struggling new playwrights to write!

find out more

Thanks to you I gained an agent and there is just no way I would have been able to afford the time and research needed to complete Retrograde without this award.
Ryan Calais Cameron

How it works

The Adopt a Playwright Award was launched in 2008 because it seemed to us that there were no schemes that saved penniless playwrights of quality at the beginning of their careers from giving up and getting a ‘proper job’ so we shaped this award to be as close and as supportive as each playwright needs us to be. Since then, over £200,000 has been raised and 47 playwrights supported. We start by asking for recommendations in October/November and gather a ‘family’ of individual donors together to raise £10,000 per year …..

find out more

This year’s winner is John O’Donovan

John O’Donovan is writing a darkly comic drama that sets out to explore what happens when intolerance wheedles its way into the least likely of spaces. Set in the west of Ireland, a group of retired men (who gather regularly in a community hall for woodworking, evening classes and social connection) encounter a charismatic new member whose hateful ideas about who belongs, and in particular who doesn’t, pitch the group into crisis. When hate infects your social circle, do you quit or do you try to dig in – is it possible to become a hate group by default? And what’s happening to old-age masculinity – men used to chat about the weather, sport or TV but suddenly it’s all EMFs, various nonsense about foreigners and the WHO. Is it only isolation and chaotic browsing or is there something more going on?

“The inspiration for this play came while reflecting on the increasing age of world leaders, geriatric men dedicating their last years to accelerating the onset of our last days. I felt such rage and powerlessness at the way these men are spending what in any other job would be their retirement: pulling up the ladder is one thing, but pissing on the rest of us below is more of it. I want to channel that anger and bitter irony into this play.”

John is a playwright from County Clare, Ireland. His debut play, IF WE GET SOME MORE COCAINE I COULD SHOW YOU HOW I LOVE YOU, premiered in London in 2016 to critical acclaim before tours and productions in Ireland, Spain and Australia. SINK premiered at the 2019 Dublin Fringe, while FLIGHTS toured Ireland & the UK in 2020. In 2020, John wrote the short video-play YOUR HANDS featuring Nicola Coughlan for Dear Ireland at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.

John won the 2021 Phelim Donlon/ITI Bursary, the 2018 BBC Radio/Stewart Parker Drama Award, 2017 IARA award for best playwright and a Vault Festival London award, along with two Peggy Ramsay Awards. He has had stories and articles published in The Irish Times, Verbal Arts, Bare Fiction and Crannóg magazines. He was one of UCD’s inaugural Creative Fellows where he occasionally teaches and mentors, and regularly teaches creative writing in Limerick Youth Service. Previous attachments include Royal Court Young Writers Programme, the Old Vic 12, The Orange Tree Writers Collective, BBC Writers Room TV Drama Writers’ Programme and the Irish Theatre Institute’s Six in the Attic.

John says of the award: ‘Without the sort of legacy safety nets that subsidise many a creative career, there are lots of talented and deserving writers at risk of falling away for want of timely and consistent support. To receive this kind of financial and moral aid in mid-career gives me great encouragement and the practical means I need to keep my head afloat as I write this play. I’m very grateful to Sofie and Diana and all of the Panel for their belief in me.’

Previous winners

Paul Anthony Morris was the first playwright chosen for the scheme in 2008 and, with your help, completed his new play IDENTITY about the fall-out in the UK from the Grenada Revolution. Pericles Snowdon became the second playwright to win the award in 2009 and completed an extraordinary piece on Romany gypsies, THEY WHO LAY IN THE FIELDS LIKE BEASTS. Kenneth Emson followed in 2010 writing WHITE, a brutally honest story about his home town in Thurrock that was shortlisted to the final ten for The Bruntwood Prize. Sarah Grochala was our fourth winner in 2011 writing SMOLENSK inspired by the events unfolding after the Polish plane crash on 10 April 2010. Clara Brennan completed her year as the fifth winner with her smouldering new play THE VENDOR. Satinder Chohan wrote a shocking new piece on fertility clinics, MOTHER INDIA, in the sixth year. Steven Hevey then flexed his muscles writing two dramatically different plays in 2014 – APOPHIS and KING FOR A DAY. Rose Ruane was our eighth winner in 2015 completing CONFESSIONS OF A TEENAGE POLTERGEIST, a play about the power of memory and the pain of anonymity. Our ninth, Adam Hughes, completed his year with a tough new play YOUNG GIRL that raises controversial questions about the human cost and political gain behind Operation Yewtree. Olga Braga also finished two hard hitting plays – STROIKA and LEAVE TO REMAIN – about war and trauma both in the Ukraine and around a London dinner table. Our eleventh, Ryan Calais Cameron, spun back to the 1950s to a vivid recreation of Sidney Poitier confronting McCarthyism and racism in RETROGRADE. Isabel Dixon became our twelfth with KALEIDOSCOPES, a play about gaslighting and stories that flicker between truth and lies while Hannah Lavery dug deep into the poetry of the subconscious in WHEN WE LIVED IN TREES; George Bailey wrote WRINKLED dramatising the hatred between generations in British society today and Corey Weekes wrote QUICKSAND a play of family heartbreak, inherited trauma and class. Jane Upton our sixteenth winner wrote BELONGINGS about the impact of immigration on a small Midlands town.

PAUL MORRIS

2009

PERICLES SNOWDEN

2010

KENNY EMSON

2011

SARAH GROCHALA

2012

CLARA BRENNAN

2013

SATINDER CHOHAN

2014

STEVEN HEVEY

2015

ROSE RUANE

2016

ADAM HUGHES

2017

OLGA BRAGA

2018

RYAN CALAIS CAMERON

2019

ISABEL DIXON

2020

HANNAH LAVERY

2022

COREY WEEKES

2023

GEORGIE BAILEY

2023

JANE UPTON

2024

Speech! Speech!

Playwright Fin Kennedy’s speech at the launch of the Adopt A Playwright Award

Guidelines

for selection of candidates

With huge thanks to our growing family of Angels

Archangels

Anon
Sofie Mason
Nicholas Payne
Stephen Garrett

Angels

Anonymous
Susan Adams
Bill & Nini Aldridge
George Aza-Selinger
John Bakewell
Primrose Bell
Katrina Bennett
John Bird
Annie Blaber
Lanier Brannen
Clive Brill
David Chiltern
Terence Chisholm
Bernice Chitnis
Ann Clifford
Kay Ellen Consolver
Debbie Cowley
Chris Crowcroft
Caroline Margaret Day
Victoria Dickie
Cas Donald
David Donegan
Zuleika Dobson
Vineeta Dufficy
Bernadette Earley
Sascha Evans
Oliver Everett
Siri Fisher Hansen
Emily Fletcher
Joachim Fleury
John & Bea Flynn
Francesca Franchi
Laura Gallo
Pooja Ghai
David Hare
Jessica Hepburn
Tracy Hilliard
Alison Hindell
Bernard Ho
Frankie & Theo Holloway
Diana Jervis-Read
Margaret Levin
Janine Limberg
Richard & Kath Lynam
Mary Martin
Jocelyn Mason
Anne Mayer
Seth Melhado
Gerry Moss
Nicholas Payne
Linda Plant
Seven Prevezer
Emma Reeves
Suzanne Reid
Sebastian Rex
Mirium Ryley
Wendy Salisbury
John Sandy
Jon Satow
Jenny Sheridan
Carol & Peter Slavid
Geraldine Sharpe Newton
Tom Stoppard
Bob & Gael Strong
Tori Stroud
Pauline Tambling
Paul & Kathy Wade
Janet Walsh
Camilla Whitworth Jones
Elwyn Williams
Jo Wright

Advisory Panel to date

George Aza-Selinger
Clive Brill
Declan Feenan
Joachim Fleury
Blayne George
James Haddrell
Pippa Hill
Alison Hindell
Holly Kendrick
Fin Kennedy
David Lan
Walter Meierjohann
Kerry Michael
Paul Morris
Pericles Snowdon
Julia Tyrrel
Camilla Whitworth Jones
Roy Williams

Facilitator:
Sadie Keenan

To make a donation please make a bank transfer to:

Off West End Plays & Playwrights
Charitable Aid Foundation
Sort code: 40-52-40
Account: 00023389

Thank You!

Be an Angel

How it works

This year’s winner is John O’Donovan

Previous winners

Our Foster Children

With huge thanks to our growing family of Angels