The Women’s Prize for Playwriting 2025

Submissions will open for the Women’s Prize for Playwriting 2025 on Monday 13 January and close on Tuesday 22 April 2025.

The First Prize will be £20,000: the biggest prize fund so far, and with Sheffield Theatres coming on board as the new Theatre Partner. Created with Artistic Director of Sheffield Theatres, Elizabeth Newman, this partnership will mean that Sheffield Theatres has the first right of refusal to co-produce the world premiere of the prize’s winning play, alongside Ellie Keel Productions and Paines Plough.

The 2025 Judging Panel will be chaired by the incoming Director and Co-Chief Executive of the National Theatre, Indhu Rubasingham, with the panel also including:

• Emily Vaughan-Barratt – Producer at Wessex Grove
• Milli Bhatia – Director
• Romola Garai – Actress
• Alice Hamilton – Director
• Mel Kenyon – Literary Agent and Head of Theatre at Casarotto Ramsay
• Nancy Medina – Artistic Director of Bristol Old Vic
• Nina Steiger – the National Theatre’s Director of New Work
• Katharine Viner – Guardian Editor-in-Chief

Click here to visit the Women’s Prize for Playwriting’s website and find out more.

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 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 offer the writers new and interesting experiences to develop their craft, like participating in Sala Beckett’s annual Obrador d’estiu in Barcelona, immersing themselves in international work at the Dublin Theatre Festival and Edinburgh International Festival, and meeting some of their playwright heroes.