Shayok Misha Chowdhury and Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig Recieve Whiting Awards For Drama

This year's recipients in the category of Drama for the Whiting Awards are Shayok Misha Chowdhury and Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig. 

Since 1985, the Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, which are given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.   The awards, of $50,000 each, are based on early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury is an Obie Award-winning writer and director. His playwriting debut, Public Obscenities (Soho Rep, NAATCO, Woolly Mammoth, Theatre for a New Audience) was a New York Times Critic’s Pick and named in The New Yorker’s Best Theatre of 2023. Misha is the recipient of a Princess Grace Award, the Mark O’Donnell Prize, a Jonathan Larson Grant, and the Relentless Award for his musical How the White Girl Got Her Spots and Other 90s Trivia. Other favorite projects include MukhAgni, a performance memoir, and Englandbashi, a short experimental film. A Sundance, Fulbright, and Kundiman Fellow, Misha’s poetry has been published in The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Asian American Literary Review, and elsewhere. He received his MFA from Columbia University.

Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig is a playwright whose trilogy The China Plays: Three Parables of Global Capital was recently published by Methuen Drama. The plays in the trilogy, The World of Extreme Happiness, The King of Hell’s Palace, and Snow in Midsummer, have been produced in the UK at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Hampstead Theatre, and The National Theatre, and in the US at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Manhattan Theater Club, Classic Stage, and The Goodman Theatre. Cowhig was born in Philadelphia and raised in Northern Virginia, Okinawa, Taipei, and Beijing. Her work has been honored with the Wasserstein Prize, the Yale Drama Series Award (selected by David Hare), an Edinburgh Fringe First Award, the Keene Prize for Literature, and a United States Artist Fellowship. She lives in Southern Appalachia.