October marks Black History Month in the UK. This year’s theme, ‘Saluting our Sisters’, pays homage to the exceptional achievements of pioneering Black women, and their remarkable contributions to every part of British life.

Here, we’re celebrating five fantastic Black women playwrights – four from the UK, plus one from the USA – who rank amongst the very finest in contemporary theatre. Their work has moved and inspired British audiences, often shining a light on important subjects and provoking necessary conversations. We’re honoured to count these remarkable artists amongst our authors.

1. Winsome Pinnock

Once described by the Guardian as ‘the godmother of Black British playwrights’, Winsome Pinnock’s career spans almost forty years. Her plays include A Hero’s Welcome (1989) and Talking in Tongues (1991) at the Royal Court Theatre, London; Water (2000) and One Under (2005) at the Tricycle Theatre, London; Tituba (2016) at Hampstead Theatre, London; and Rockets and Blue Lights (Royal Exchange, Manchester, 2020; National Theatre, London, 2021).

Pinnock’s play Leave Taking, about a clash between two generations of a Black British family in 1980s London, premiered at Liverpool Playhouse in 1987. It won the George Devine Award, and when Leave Taking later transferred to the National Theatre it made Pinnock the first Black woman to have a play produced at the venue. More recently, the play was revived at the Bush Theatre, London, in 2018, and is now a set text for GCSE English Literature.

In 2022 Pinnock was awarded a Windham Campbell Prize for Drama, with the judges acclaiming her as ‘a singular voice in world theatre… [her] epic and spacious dialogue deftly opens the ear and widens the heart; it gracefully compels the spirit to reckon with the necessity for absolute freedom.’ She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020.

2. debbie tucker green

In the twenty years since her 2003 Hampstead Theatre play born bad won her the Olivier Award for Best Newcomer, debbie tucker green has firmly established herself as one of the most acclaimed and individual dramatists working today, with extraordinary plays which are precise in their language and unflinching in their subject matter.

To date, tucker green has had more than a dozen plays produced – often directing them herself – at venues including London’s Royal Court, National, Young Vic and Soho Theatres, and for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her work has also been adapted for screen; a Channel 4 adaptation of her 2008 play random (directed by tucker green) won the BAFTA for Best Single Drama, while the film version of her 2018 play ear for eye premiered at the BFI London Film Festival and on BBC Two in 2021.

When tucker green was awarded a Windham Campbell Prize for Drama in 2015, the judges’ citation praised her ‘poetic and challenging work, [which] reinvents the medium with each new production’.

3. Chinonyerem Odimba

Born in Nigeria, Chinonyerem Odimba arrived in the UK at the age of seven. A playwriting course led by Winsome Pinnock sparked within her a love of theatre which has since led to productions at the Edinburgh Fringe, Bristol Old Vic, and Hampstead and Soho Theatres in London, as well as work on radio and screen.

Odimba’s 2019 play Princess & The Hustler, which tells the story of a family caught up in the 1963 Bristol Bus Boycott – a key moment in the British Civil Rights movement – originally toured the UK as part of Eclipse Theatre’s Revolution Mix project, which aims to highlight stories from Black British history. The play is now a set text for GCSE English Literature. Her musical Black Love won Best Musical Theatre Bookwriting at the 2022 Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Awards.

Odimba is also Artistic Director and CEO of tiata fahodzi, the UK’s leading British African heritage contemporary theatre company.

4. Natasha Gordon

Previously an actor, Natasha Gordon‘s debut play Nine Night – a touching and moving story of a family undertaking the traditional Jamaican ritual of a nine-night wake – was inspired by having conducted the proceedings with her own family, following the death of her grandmother. When the play premiered at the National Theatre in 2018, it won Gordon the Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards for Most Promising Playwright.

Nine Night later transferred to Trafalgar Studios, making Gordon the first Black British woman to have a play staged in London’s West End. She was awarded an MBE in 2020 for services to drama.

5. Lynn Nottage

Born and raised in New York, Lynn Nottage is the first and only woman – and, as of 2023, the only living American playwright – to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama two times, for her plays Ruined in 2009, and Sweat in 2017.

Both have also been staged in the UK, along with other plays including Intimate Apparel and Mlima’s Tale, with another, her Tony Award-nominated Clyde’s, coming to London’s Donmar Warehouse this month. Nottage’s plays often involve intense research (Sweat came from two years of interviews with the residents of an impoverished industrial town in Pennsylvania), and foreground the struggles of the marginalised and dispossessed.

Nottage has been the recipient of a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship, and was honoured with an Award of Merit Medal by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2017. Time magazine named Nottage on their list of 100 most influential people in the world in 2019, praising her as a pioneer ‘dedicated to opening up stories that we’re not used to hearing.’

---

We’re honoured to publish the work of these five fantastic playwrights, as well as many other incredible Black authors. Discover more of their plays in our Brilliant Black Writers celebration here.

Black History Month runs throughout October in the UK. See more, including how you can get involved, on their website.