What is the Women’s Prize for Playwriting?

Paines Plough, Ellie Keel Productions and 45North launched The Women’s Prize for Playwriting in 2020 to support female, UK and Ireland-based writers. The winning playwright receives £12,000 in respect of an exclusive option for Ellie Keel Productions and Paines Plough to co-produce the winning play.

The mission of The Women’s Prize for Playwriting is to address the inequality in the number of plays written by women and men on major stages in the UK. In 2018, only 26% of new plays on main stages in Britain were by women. This prize is designed to level the playing field and to honour and celebrate the work of female and non-binary playwrights.

The submissions window for the 2023 Prize closed on Monday 17 April.

Hello writers!

Thank you for reading about how we want to work with you and support you as a national theatre company of new writing. This is an introduction to our values and practice.

At Paines Plough our main goal is to make our writer development work as wide in its geographical reach as the productions we tour across the UK and Ireland. We want to ensure that writers everywhere have access and opportunity to be discovered, developed and produced. We will do this by continually investing in different ways of reaching, supporting and working with you.

We promote the idea that a writer can take many forms; creating work in many different ways and coming from a wide range of backgrounds. We also have an active agenda in the discovery and development of under-represented writers for the theatre.

Our approach to is be bespoke to your voice and process; allowing you to be your best self; whatever that means to you. As part of this, we constantly innovate how we work with writers including challenging inherited systems, ensuring we listen to how you want to be developed, communicated with, and supported by us. If there is more we can be doing, we want you to let us know.

We will regularly post opportunities on our website for ways you can get involved and we look forward to meeting you!

Playwright Fellowship

Our Playwright Fellowship is awarded annually to a writer of exceptional promise.

The Fellowship invites the writer to spend nine months on attachment to Paines Plough, where we design a bespoke programme for each individual to tailor the attachment to their specific needs, ambitions and circumstances.

The Fellow receives a bursary and a desk at Paines Plough as well as mentorship from our Artistic Directors and Team PP.

We try to offer them new and interesting experiences like participating in Sala Beckett’s annual Obrador d’estiu in Barcelona, seeing international work at the Dublin Theatre Festival and Edinburgh International Festival and meeting their playwright heroes.