Playwrights

Writers for the stage.

People in Playwrights

23 profiles

Writer

A. A. Milne

Creating Winnie-the-Pooh and the Hundred Acre Wood.

Playwright

Bertolt Brecht

Writing Mother Courage and developing epic theatre.

Writer

Victor Hugo

Writing Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

Playwright

J. M. Barrie

Creating Peter Pan, the boy who would not grow up.

Poet

W. B. Yeats

Writing major Irish poetry and helping establish the Abbey Theatre.

Writer

Wole Soyinka

Writing Death and the King’s Horseman and winning Africa’s first literature Nobel.

Writer

Alexandre Dumas fils

Writing The Lady of the Camellias, the source of La traviata.

Writer

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Writing Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Writer

Agatha Christie

Creating Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and ingenious murder mysteries.

Playwright

Oscar Wilde

Writing The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray, with wit that exposes social hypocrisy.

Playwright

Arthur Miller

Writing Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, dramas about private failure and public pressure.

Playwright

William Shakespeare

Writing Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and other enduring plays.

Writer

Kalidasa

Writing Sanskrit poetry and plays including Shakuntala and Meghaduta.

Playwright

Jon Fosse

Writing spare plays and the novel sequence Septology in Norwegian Nynorsk.

Playwright

Luigi Pirandello

Writing Six Characters in Search of an Author and plays that question identity and reality.

Writer

Girish Karnad

Reworking history and myth into major modern Kannada plays.

Writer

Vijay Tendulkar

Writing Marathi plays that confront violence, patriarchy and political power.

Playwright

Habib Tanvir

Bringing Chhattisgarhi performers and traditions into modern Indian theatre.

Playwright

Athol Fugard

Dramatising apartheid’s human consequences in plays such as Blood Knot.

Playwright

Wajdi Mouawad

Writing Incendies, a family mystery shaped by war and inherited trauma.

Playwright

Yussef El Guindi

Writing Back of the Throat and plays about immigrant experience.

Playwright

Neil Simon

Writing The Odd Couple and Lost in Yonkers

Writer

Ali Ahmad Bakathir

Arabic verse drama and historical fiction.