a.k. payne Wins The 2025 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize For FURLOUGH'S PARADISE

The 2025 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize has been given to U.S. playwright a.k. payne for their play Furlough's Paradise. Awarded annually since 1978, the prestigious international Prize is the largest and oldest award recognizing women+ who have written works of outstanding quality for the English-speaking theatre. 

On March 10, the Prize hosted theatre artists and leaders at NYC's Playwrights Horizons to honor and celebrate payne and a cohort of 8 Finalists. Payne received a cash prize of $25,000, and a signed print by renowned artist Willem De Kooning, created especially for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

On receiving the 2025 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, a.k. payne remarked, “I am so grateful to receive this award and join a list of some of my favorite writers whose plays have shaken how I understand the world and who have made it possible—through their words transcending space and time and/or their caring and abundant mentorship—for me to write: Katori Hall, Julia Cho, Lynn Nottage, Sarah Ruhl, Benedict Lombe and Paula Vogel to name a very select few.”

Prize executive director Leslie Swackhamer remarked, “At this moment in our history as a country, and as a Prize which honors women, trans and non-binary writers, we must acknowledge the very real threats that are being aimed at our hard-won freedoms. We must remind ourselves of the power of our voices, and the special magic we create when we lift them at the theatre. Every voice on our stage tonight deserves to be honored, celebrated and heard.”

Payne has described her play as a “lyrical journey about grief, home, and survival.” Furlough's Paradise tells the story of two cousins and their intertwined yet wildly divergent lives. Sade and Mina, raised like sisters, return to their childhood town for the funeral of their mother and aunt. While Sade is on a three-day furlough from prison and Mina experiences a brief reprieve from her career and life on the West Coast, the two try to make sense of grief, home, love, and kinship. But traumas and resentments from the past, both real and surreal, threaten to pull them apart, all as time ticks towards the correctional officer's arrival. A tight 80-page play for two actors, the play masterfully explores what it means to be a Black woman in today's America and shines a bright light on the lack of social safety nets in the wealthiest country in the world. The play won the 20th annual Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition, as well as The National Theatre Conference's Stavis Playwriting Award. 

Furlough's Paradise was nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize by Atlanta's Alliance Theatre which premiered the play in 2024, directed by the Alliance's Artistic Director, Tinashe Kajese-Bolden.  This April, the play will receive its West Coast premiere, also directed by Kajese-Bolden, at The Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.

In his season announcement, Geffen Artistic Director Tarell Alvin McCraney said, “This play is poetic and funny, but it's also charting what it means to try to find a utopia in a world that has a criminal justice system that is far from perfect. Payne was one of my students, and probably one of the most powerful writers I've encountered in my time as a professor.” McCraney is the chair of playwriting at Yale School of Drama, where payne received her MFA. 

Additional Awards: This year two plays received Special Commendations of $10,000 each, a rare honor given at the discretion of the judges:

49 Days by Haruna Lee (Taiwan-Japan-US) submitted by Playwrights Horizons (New York)

An Oxford Man by Else Went (US), submitted by South Coast Repertory (Costa Mesa)

Finalists for the 2025 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, each of whom received $5,000 are:

Chris Bush (UK) Otherland, submitted by the Almeida Theatre (London)

Carys Coburn (Ireland) BÁN, submitted by The Abbey Theatre (Dublin)

Keiko Green (US) You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World, submitted by the UC San Diego MFA Playwriting Program (San Diego)

Isobel Mcarthur (UK-Scotland) The Fair Maid of the West, submitted by the Royal Shakespeare Company, (Stratford-Upon-Avon/London)

Suzie Miller (Australia-UK) Inter Alia, submitted by The National Theatre (London)

Anna Ziegler (US) The Janeiad, submitted by The Alley Theatre (Houston)

Past Winners of the Prize include Annie Baker, Alice Birch, Benedict Lombe, Julia Cho, Caryl Churchill, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Katori Hall, Lucy Kirkwood, Marsha Norman, Lynn Nottage, Dael Orlandersmith, Lucy Prebble, Sarah Ruhl, Paula Vogel, Wendy Wasserstein, Timberlake Wertenbaker and Cheryl West.  Last year's Winner, 1536 by Ava Pickett, will premiere at the Almeida Theatre in London this May, directed by Olivier-winner Lindsey Turner.

Judges for the 2025 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize are: Linda Cho (US) – Tony Award-winning Costume Designer; Jennifer Ehle (US) – Tony and BAFTA Award-winning actress; NANCY MEDINA (UK) – Artistic Director of the Bristol Old Vic; Mark Ravenhill (UK) – Acclaimed playwright; George Strus (US) – Founder, Breaking the Binary Theatre; and Indira Varma (UK) – Olivier Award-winning actress.

Over 500 plays have been honored as Finalists of the Prize and many have gone on to receive other top honors, including Olivier, Lilly, Evening Standard and Tony Awards for Best Play. Eleven Susan Smith Blackburn Finalist playwrights have subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. The Prize results in more productions of plays by women+ writers and fosters the interchange of plays between the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and other English-speaking countries.

ABOUT a.k. payne

a.k. payne (they/she) is a playwright, artist-theorist, and theatermaker with roots in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They hold a B.A. in English and African-American Studies from Yale College and an MFA in Playwriting under Tarell Alvin McCraney from Yale School of Drama. A 2023-2024 Van Lier New Voices Fellow, their work has been a finalist for the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award and a 2x finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the largest international prize for women+ playwrights. Their work has been developed with the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, The New Harmony Project, Great Plains Theater Conference, and Manhattan Theater Club's "Groundworks Lab."  She is currently a resident artist/fellow with National Black Theatre's I AM SOUL Playwrights Residency and Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh Foundation).