Playwriting workshop: SIMON STEPHENS

Simon Stephens

Simon Stephens is one of the country’s most prolific playwrights. He is perhaps best known for his stage adaptation of the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, for which he won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Play. Stephens has staged close to three dozen plays over two decades, including the critically acclaimed Pornography (2007), Punk Rock (2009) and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2012), which premiered at the National Theatre and later toured on the West End and Broadway. It went on to win seven Olivier awards, then the equal record for a single play.

Many recent works, including The Funfair (2015) and Fatherland (2017) have premiered in Manchester theatres. Stephens also currently works as Artistic Associate at the Lyric Theatre where his adaptation of The Seagull was produced in 2017 and he is Associate Playwright at the Royal Court, where he ran the Young Writers Programme for several years. 

Simon is an alumni of the University of York, where he studied History, and it was while here that he spent many hours in the Drama Barn as part of Drama Soc. Simon is Professor of Scriptwriting at Manchester Metropolitan University.