The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize Announces 2022 Finalists

The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize today announces 10 Finalists for its prestigious playwriting award, the oldest and largest prize awarded to women+ playwrights - now in its 44th year .

Chosen from a group of over 160 plays submitted from around the world, the 2022 Finalists are:

Chiara Atik (US) - Poor Clare

Daniella De Jesús (US) - Get Your Pink Hands Off Me Sucka and Give Me Back (FKA Columbus Play)

Sarah Hanly (Ireland) - Purple Snowflakes and Titty Wanks

Zora Howard (US) - BUST

Sonya Kelly (Ireland) - The Last Return

Benedict Lombe (UK) - Lava

Joanna Murray-Smith (AU) - Berlin

Kae Tempest (UK) - Paradise

Lauren Whitehead (US) - The Play Which Raises the Question of What Happened in/to Low Income Black Communities between 1974 and 2004 And Hints at Why Mass Incarceration is Perhaps a Man-Made Disease And Highlights the Government's General Lack of
Empathy for Poor People of Color And Dispels the Notion that Our Condition is Our Fault And Helps Make Visible Why We Riot When We Mourn And also Tells the Story of Anita Freeman & her Kids

Amanda Wilkin (UK) - Shedding a Skin

The Winner, to be announced in April, will be awarded a cash prize of $25,000, and will receive a signed print by renowned artist Willem De Kooning, created especially for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Each of the additional Finalists will receive an award of $5,000.

The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize is awarded annually to celebrate women+ who have written works of outstanding quality for the English-speaking theatre. Women+ includes women, transgender, and non-binary playwrights. Each year, artistic directors and prominent professionals in the theatre are invited to submit plays. Each script receives multiple readings by members of an international reading committee that selects the finalists. An international panel of six judges then selects the winning play.

Judges for the 2022 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize are: star of stage and screen, actor/writer /producer Adjoa Andoh (UK); noted playwright and associate artistic director of Center Theatre Group, Luis Alfaro (US); writer, director, and artistic director of the Unicorn Theatre, Justin Audibert (UK); winner of multiple Olivier and Tony Awards for lighting design, Paule Constable (UK);); stage, film and television star Saidah Arrika Ekulona (US); and Obie and Lilly award-winning director, actor and musician, Whitney White (US).

Leslie Swackhamer, Executive Director of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, said, "this has been a phenomenal year for new voices in playwriting. Two of our finalists are debut plays, and nine are first-time finalists for this Prize. All of the plays are highly theatrical and probe the burning issues of our times."

Since the Prize's founding in 1978, over 470 plays have been honored as Finalists. 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 has also fostered an interchange of plays between the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and other English-speaking countries.

Past winners of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize include Erika Dickerson-Despenza's Cullud Wattah, Lynn Nottage's Sweat, Lucy Prebble's A Very Expensive Poison, Jackie Sibblies Drury's Fairview, Annie Baker's The Flick, Caryl Churchill's Fen and Serious Money, Marsha Norman's 'night,Mother, Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive, Julia Cho's The Language Archive, Katori Hall's Hurt Village, Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles, Chloe Moss's This Wide Night, Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House, Judith Thompson's Palace of the End, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's Behzti (Dishonour), Jennifer Haley's The Nether, Naomi Wallace's One Flea Spare, and Moira Buffini's Silence.

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