Liz Lochhead Editor & Author

Caryl Churchill is an award-winning playwright, whose plays are renowned for their striking influence upon contemporary British theatre practices. Indicative of her enduring impression upon the theatrical landscape, Churchill has won Obie Awards for her widely celebrated plays Cloud 9 (1979), Top Girls (1982), Serious Money (1987) and A Number (2002). Further cementing her reputation as an outstanding playwright, in 2002 Churchill won an Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement and in 2010 was placed in the American Theatre Hall of Fame. She continues to produce innovative and provocative work, such as Seven Jewish Children - a play for Gaza (2009) and Love and Information (2012), and in January 2016 her latest full-length play, Escaped Alone, opened at the Royal Court Theatre to great acclaim. With an illustrious theatre career that transcends four decades, Caryl Churchill is arguably more than just one of Britain’s most revered female playwrights; she is one of Britain’s most respected and groundbreaking working today. Alison Lyssa is an Australian playwright. Her plays include The Boiling Frog, Dead Men's Trousers, The Hospital Half Hour, Pinball, Who'd've Thought? and The Year of the Migrant. Jamaican-born playwright Grace Dayley's plays include Rose's Story, first performed at South Bank Polytechnic in 1984, and Grace's Story (1986), which premiered at The Cockpit, London. Liz Lochhead (b. Motherwell, 1947) is a Scottish poet and playwright. Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University (1986-7) and Royal Shakespeare Company in 1988, her first collection of poems, Memo for Spring, was published in 1972, winning a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. A performer as well as a poet, her revue Sugar and Spite was staged in 1978. Other plays include Blood and Ice (1982), first performed at the Edinburgh Traverse in 1982; Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1989), first performed by Communicado Theatre Company at the 1987 Edinburgh festival; Dracula (1989); Cuba (1997), a play for young people commissioned by the Royal National Theatre for the BT National Connections Scheme; and Perfect Days (1998), first performed at the Edinburgh festival in 1998. She has also done many adaptations.