The British playwright Ava Pickett has won this year’s Susan Smith Blackburn prize for female, transgender and non-binary playwrights.
Pickett’s winning play, 1536, unfolds in Tudor Essex and follows three women as they discuss the news of Anne Boleyn’s arrest. Pickett called it a “very funny and very angry play” about female friendship. In a ceremony at the Royal Court theatre in London on Monday, she was awarded $25,000 (£19,900) and a signed print by Willem de Kooning.
There were 10 plays on the shortlist for the award, chosen from more than 200 submissions. Pickett’s play was submitted by the Almeida theatre who commissioned it as part of their Genesis programme. The judges praised Pickett’s characters who “speak across the centuries” in a play with “sparkling dialogue and thrilling, charismatic writing underpinned by great craft and restraint”. They acknowledged the play’s portrayal of a “rising tide of puritanical misogyny”, and how it affects the characters and their relationships.
Pickett added: “What a privilege it is to even be considered among such great company. I wrote this play from a place of fury, love and hunger to see more of the beauty and brutality of friendship on stage and I have loved writing Anna, Jane and Mariella even when they weren’t easy to write.”
A performer as well as a writer, Pickett graduated from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2018. She was a staff writer on season 3 of the historical comedy drama The Great and wrote the comedy Roots for BBC Radio 4 which was broadcast in 2020 and starred Vicky McClure. 1536 received a special mention at the 2023 George Devine award for its “inventiveness, playfulness and savage undercurrent”.
The Susan Smith Blackburn prize also announced a special commendation award of $10,000 for US playwright Justice Hehir for The Dowagers, a play set during the Covid-19 pandemic, described by Hehir as “a meditation on loss and lust”. The eight remaining finalists each received an award of $5,000.
Last year, the prize – which has run since 1978 – was won by US playwright Sarah Mantell for In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot, a play about “queer ageing, capitalism, campfires and falling in love as the world ends”. Mantell was on this year’s judging panel, alongside poet-playwright Inua Ellams, the actors April Matthis and Clare Perkins, and the directors Eric Ting and Lyndsey Turner.