This November, the Alfred Fagon Award is offering free writing workshops for 30 Black British playwrights living in the East Midlands, the South West and West Yorkshire (ten in each region).
The workshops will be led by past winners of the Alfred Fagon Award for Best New Play of the Year – Oladipo Agboluaje, Juliet Gilkes Romero and Paula B. Stanic, and hosted by our partner venues – Leeds Playhouse, Nottingham Playhouse and Bristol Old Vic.
Pauline Walker, Creative Producer at the Alfred Fagon Award says, “Our data of the last ten years shows that entries to the Alfred Fagon Award from writers based outside of London is on average 31% a year while entries for London-based writers is 69%.
As Britain’s leading award for Black British playwrights, we want to encourage more regional new writers to start writing, and emerging writers to keep writing. By partnering with three leading regional theatres, we’re also giving the writers the opportunity to develop a relationship with venues where their work may be staged in the future and contribute to a vibrant regional ecology of theatre making without having to base their career in London.
We’ll be paying the travel costs for writers to get to the venues and encourage all new and emerging writers, no matter their experience or background to apply.
We’re asking the writers who come to workshop to commit to writing a draft of a play within four months of attending the workshop, and from those drafts we’ll select ten writers who will have the opportunity for extracts from their plays to be showcased at our Festival of Staged Readings next year, to mark the 30th anniversary of the Alfred Fagon Award. We’re excited to read the new plays that new and emerging writers will create.”
Workshops are free to attend, and we’ll pay the writers’ travel. Applicants can find out how to apply by clicking on the following links: East Midlands / South West / West Yorkshire
The workshops are supported by a grant from Arts Council England, and donations from individuals in the AFA Giving Circle, with venue support from Bristol Old Vic, Leeds Playhouse and Nottingham Playhouse.
