British playwright Alice Birch has won the 2018 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, a prestigious award for women playwrights, for “Anatomy of a Suicide.”
This is the 40th anniversary of the prize awarded annually to recognize women from around the world who have written “works of outstanding quality for the English-speaking theater.” She will receive $25,000 and a signed and numbered print by artist Willem de Kooning.
“Anatomy of a Suicide” premiered at the Royal Court last spring, directed by Katie Mitchell., portraying three generations of women “struggling with a legacy of depression in a family haunted by its past.”
The announcement regarding the prize described the play as “a triptych in which the three separate yet interconnected narratives” take place in different time periods, performed simultaneously.
The Financial Times called it a “haunting piece of theatre” with a creative, effective narrative strategy where “form meets the subject, in that the weight of the past in the present is constantly, physically felt.”
Guardian theater critic Michael BIllington has praised Birch’s “gift for radical experiment” and “remarkable gift for reinventing dramatic form”.
She has been a two-time Finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for her plays Many Moons and Revolt. She is the winner of the Arts Foundation Award for Playwriting 2014 and the co-winner of the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright 2014.
The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize was co-founded by Susan’s sister, Emilie Kilgore, and Susan’s husband, William Blackburn, in 1977.
The Houston-based Prize seeks to reflect “the values and interests of Susan Smith Blackburn,” an American actress and writer who lived in London during the last 15 years of her life.
“She believed that promoting women’s voices was vital and shamefully neglected,” according to a statement issued with the announcement of this year’s winner.
Since the founding of the Prize, more than 390 plays have been honored as finalists with some winners going on to win Olivier, Lilly, and Tony Awards for Best Play.
Ten Blackburn finalist plays have subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, making this contest a pretty good barometer for even bigger rewards that sometimes follow.