Announcing our Mentored Writers for Year 3 of Tour the Writer

We’re delighted to announce year three of Tour the Writer, our multi-year writer development programme in partnership with seven locations around the country.

We’ve selected two writers from each of the 7 areas, who we’ll continue to mentor through the next year, and whose work will culminate in a showcase of their work.

Bradford (Bradford 2025 & Bradford Producing Hub):
Dan Loops & Jan Ruppe

Colchester (Mercury Playwrights in association with Tour the Writer):
Emma Bernard & Ben SantaMaria

Coventry (Belgrade Theatre):
Sara Amanda & Matthew Gabrielli

Cumbria (Theatre by the Lake, Keswick):
Sophia Atcha & Rachel Price

North Devon (Landmark Theatres):
Kayleigh Mai Hinsley & Selina Keedwell

Peterborough (Landmark Theatres)
Jessy Roberts & Emily Swettenham

Plymouth (Theatre Royal Plymouth):
Jon Nash & Jane Spurr.

Tour the Writer has been generously supported by the Noel Coward Foundation in Year 2 and the Garrick Charitable Trust in Year 3.

Dan Loops

Dan Loops is a Sheffield-born, Leeds/Bradford-based writer, actor-musician and theatre-maker whose work blends music, lyricism and character-led storytelling. With roots in the UK’s alt-hip-hop scene, Dan brings a distinctive voice to the stage, drawing on beatboxing, intricate guitar work and live vocal looping to create pieces that are both playful and politically charged. He’s written and performed original theatre for companies including Opera North, Sheffield Theatres and Theatre in the Mill. His work often tackles big ideas — identity, race, belonging — through humour, rhythm and music. Dan is currently developing two new music-led shows, exploring themes of creative conflict, masculinity and cultural memory. His writing sits at the intersection of gig theatre, spoken word and contemporary storytelling.

Jan Ruppe

Jan trained at LAMDA and worked in TV and theatre for many years as an actor. Her stage play ‘Cut It Out’ is published by Aurora Metro. Jan is a member of New Writing North’s Bradford Script Hub funded by Channel 4 and was an inaugural member of The Mayor’s Script Diversity programme run by Screen Yorkshire. Jan’s short film ‘Trees’ has screened at several festivals including the BAFTA qualifying Carmarthen Bay Film Festival. Her short film script, ‘Only Words’ was the winner of Best Short Screenplay at Leedsflix 2025. Jan has recently reached the top 5% of the Grass Routes Prize – a TV pilot competition run by Matriarch Productions and Birdie Pictures. She is the co-director of Bradford International Film Festival.

Emma Bernard

Emma Bernard is a theatre-maker, playwright, stage director, and arts facilitator, who specialises in integrating experienced and community casts. Emma wrote and directed her first play “Living on Air” in 2024, with mentoring support from Tour the Writer, and it was produced by Cohere Arts at Eastern Angles, Ipswich, in April 2025. Living On Air is a comic look at the sexual politics of the 1970’s, set in a Suffolk radio station, developed with and performed by twelve visually impaired actors from Suffolk. She is excited to be developing her second play, “ENOUGH”, about the shrinking, hallucinatory world of a family carer. www.emmabernard.co.uk

Ben SantaMaria

Ben SantaMaria is a queer and non-binary writer, director and producer. They are artistic director of Flaming Theatre, a Theatre503 dramaturg and BAFTA Connect member. Ben completed the Criterion Theatre New Writing Programme, Soho Theatre Edinburgh Lab and National Theatre Directors Course. Plays include: Really Want to Hurt Me (Assembly Hall/Soho Theatre/Theatre503/UK tour; Brighton Fringe Award for Excellence shortlist), Is This Desire? (Theatre503 International Playwriting Award longlist), Lulla (Verity Bargate Award top 100), In Need (VBA top 10%), Jarman Garden (Riverside Studios; Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award finalist). Films: Develop (Iris Prize Micro-Short Award finalist), Demons (BFI NETWORK Script Lab shortlist).

Sara Amanda

Sara is a writer and dramaturg, and a reluctant director, from London who has lived in the West Midlands for the past ten years. She holds a MA in Dramaturgy and Writing for Performance from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work spans film, television and theatre, with a focus on stories that explore social and political resonance, cultural identity and structural inequality. She is currently Creative Director at Lewisham Youth Theatre, where she supports young creatives to tell bold and creative stories that reflect the world they live in.

Matthew Gabrielli

Matthew Gabrielli is an award-winning neurodivergent writer for stage and screen, he describes his work as telling tales and having adventures, he’s interested in speculative fiction, weird tales and folklore. He loves working with these genres as they are big populace dramas driven by ideas, and enjoys playing with and dismantling genre conventions to find new meanings in old stories that are timely, personal and imaginative. His work is often political, occasionally funny and always a good night out.

Sophia Atcha

Sophia Atcha, a versatile Creative Practitioner from Bolton, has made Cockermouth her home for the past 14 years, specialising in interdisciplinary work across theatre writing, visual arts, and cultural education. Selected for mentorship through Paines Plough’s “Tour the Writer” in collaboration with Theatre by the Lake, with support from the Noel Coward Foundation, she has undertaken various commissions. Her contributions to Kirkgate Arts’ “In My Shoes” Oral History Project include a photo exhibition and storytelling about her life as a second-generation British South Asian woman. Delivered writing workshops at Rosehill Theatre on “Home – Calm and Harmony” and penned a poignant monologue, “The Calling,” performed at The Lowry, exploring themes of honour killing and postpartum psychosis. Sophia engages in discussions about Alzheimer’s and cultural displacement within the South Asian community in Bolton, addressing caregiver challenges.

Rachel Price

Rachel is a writer and arts marketeer. As a Mentored Writer on the Paines Plough Tour the Writer scheme, she is developing her play, Fellraisers. Also in development is Mill Girl, supported with funding from Arts Council England, and initially developed through the Box of Tricks Theatre Pen Pals Writing Cohort. She is currently under commission by Riding Lights Theatre Company too. Writing includes: She Was Walking Home, And How Are Your Goats Keeping (Next Door But One); The Castaways (White Tree Theatre); Eric & Moira (Next Left Theatre); Stories from Srebrenica (Bradford College, Remembering Srebrenica). Her short film, Switch Off, was an official selection of the Nightpiece International Film Festival. She has a BA Hons in Drama & Creative Writing from Buckinghamshire New University.

Kayleigh Mai Hinsley

Kayleigh Mai Hinsley is a playwright and dramaturg of mixed English, Irish and Sri Lankan descent from Combe Martin, North Devon. She now works both in Devon and in London. Kayleigh’s work has been shortlisted for The Bread & Roses Playwriting Award as well as longlisted for The Peter Shaffer Postgraduate Award for Playwriting and The Ilfeld Prize. Her recent credits include: Short Bones (Theatre503, Rapid Write Response), Fragile House (Omnibus Theatre, Next Page Season), Wet Bulb (Drayton Arms), and Moth Play (Exeter Phoenix & The House, Plymouth). First Gravedigger, her play for Tour The Writer, is a political pressure-cooker protest play.

Selina Keedwell

Selina Keedwell is a South-West based, trucker’s daughter and mum of three. With support from a DYCP through Arts Council England and as a mentored writer with Paines Plough, Selina has been co-creating ‘The Isolation Room’, an immersive dark comedy for teenagers and adults, set in a UK, state school Isolation Room. Selina is dedicated to challenging the existing structures that make ‘theatre’ inaccessible to many young people. She is fired-up by raw language that authentically represents the dialect and rhythm, guts and truth of young communities. As Creative Director of Somerset Youth Theatre, Selina focuses on building communities where young people feel safer, brave, and connected, capturing under-represented stories and voices through a process of verbatim and co-creation.

Jessy Roberts

Jessy is a director, dramaturg and playwright from Peterborough. She trained at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and studied Theatre at the University of York. She is the Senior Reader at the National Theatre Studio, and was previously Literary Assistant at Soho Theatre. She runs a theatre company, Teastain Theatre, and is an Associate Director of Bomb Factory Theatre and The Rondo Theatre. She was a New Associate with New Perspectives in 2024/25, a member of the Directors Cohort at Colchester’s Mercury Theatre in 2023/24, and previously an Associate Writer with Middle Child Theatre.

Emily Swettenham

Emily is an East Anglian playwright, who writes about labour, identity, and the environment in the context of late-stage capitalism. Her current project is The Moderators, a play exploring the world of social media content moderators. Stylistically, Emily is inspired by Annie Baker’s natural rhythms and Tony Kushner’s use of magic realism to psychologically unpick difficult historical moments and to imagine a better world. Emily’s work has been staged at Theatre503 and her first play was longlisted for the RSC’s 37 Plays project. In her final year at the University of Cambridge, she won the Sykes Prize for Prose Fiction.

Jon Nash

Jon is a playwright and theatre director based in the South West who is enthusiastic about getting new plays on the stage (including his own!) in the region. His work explores truth in the digital age, our connection with the more than human world and LGBT stories. He is currently touring a one person show ‘Is Anybody There?’ about the ways in which our minds lead us astray and running Write Out Loud-a project to develop LGBTQ writers in Devon and Cornwall. He is thrilled to be heading into Year Three of Tour The Writer.

Jane Spurr

Jane is a Cornish-based playwright, actor, and filmmaker working across multiple platforms, both solo and collaboratively. They create imaginative and diverse works on stage, screen, and live performance. Jane has won several awards for playwriting, and has been a Lab Associate Artist at Theatre Royal Plymouth, as well as an Open Sessions writer in residence at Bristol Old Vic.