A playwright who was considering a “complete career change” because of the Covid-19 pandemic’s devastating impact on the arts has been announced as the winner of this year’s Women’s prize for playwriting.
Karis Kelly won the prize for Consumed, a drama about four generations of Northern Irish women at a 90th birthday party in a “house full of hungry ghosts”. Kelly, who has been writing plays since 2008, said “like many others in the arts, during the pandemic, I had a complete crisis of faith … So to go from that point to receiving recognition from such an amazing prize and panel of judges is genuinely a dream come true.”
Literary agent Mel Kenyon chaired the judging panel, which included the Guardian’s chief theatre critic Arifa Akbar, playwright Lucy Kirkwood and Doctor Who star Jodie Whittaker.
The award, now in its second year, is vital “in today’s theatre ecology”, said Kelly, who received the prize of £12,000 at a ceremony on Thursday at the London Library. “We really do need programmes that highlight female and female-identifying voices. I’m so proud to be a part of its legacy.”
More than 850 scripts were entered for the prize, which is produced by Ellie Keel and the touring theatre company Paines Plough. Keel called Consumed “warm, funny, deft and sharply observed”, and added: “We’ve got a long way still to go in terms of parity between male and female writers on major stages and I hope that the exceptional plays brought together under the banner of this prize demonstrate that there’s no shortage of talent: only, in some places, a reluctance to recognise it or give it a chance.” Katie Posner and Charlotte Bennett, joint artistic directors of Paines Plough, said they had called each other after reading Consumed and found they had “both been howling with laughter, moved and shocked all within the first 10 pages”.
Consumed is set to be programmed in 2023. In 2020, the prize’s inaugural year, two scripts won: Amy Trigg’s Reasons You Should(n’t) Love Me, which was later staged at the Kiln theatre in London, and Ahlam’s You Bury Me, which had a staged reading during last year’s Edinburgh international festival.
