Wish List by Katherine Soper has been announced as the winner of the 10th anniversary Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting 2015 – Europe’s biggest playwriting prize. Katherine is a Cambridge graduate with an MA in playwriting from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and wins £16,000, plus a residency at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester. Wish List is Katherine Soper’s first play.
This year the judges decided to present an additional, fourth, Judges’ Award to four playwrights whose work impressed them. Among these were TLC script editor Alan Harris, with his stage play How My Light is Spent. Alan is a longstanding script editor with TLC, and is open to requests for editorial work on play scripts through the office: . The Bruntwood announcement included the following summary of Alan’s work:
Alan Harris’s How My Light Is Spent is a heartfelt and humorous take on loneliness, isolation and longing, the play follows two people who meet and fall in love on a phone-sex line. Alan Harris’ previous work includes: Marsha: A Girl Who Does Bad Things (liveartshow/Arcola), The Opportunity of Efficiency (New National Theatre Tokyo/National Theatre Wales), Wolf, The Lighthouse, A Certain Date, Take Me To Victoria Park (all BBC Radio 4), The Gold Farmer (BBC Radio 3), The Future For Beginners (liveartshow/Wales Millennium Centre), The Magic Toyshop (Invisible Ink/Theatr Iolo), A Good Night Out in the Valleys (National Theatre Wales), Re-Set (Mess Up The Mess), Marsha (Capital Fringe, Washington DC), Rhinegold, Manga Sister (both liveartshow, The Yard, London), The Journey (Welsh National Opera), The Hidden Valley (Birdsong Opera/WNO), Cardboard Dad (Sherman Cymru), Miss Brown To You (Hijinx Theatre), Brute (Operating Theatre Company), Orange (Sgript Cymru), Come To Where I’m From (Paines Plough). He was given a Creative Wales Award in 2011 from the Arts Council of Wales and, following work with prisoners at HMP Cardiff, is a Koestler Trust platinum award winner.
