BULLMORE AND KUTI CO-WINNERS 2006

Amelia Bullmore's Mammals and Elizabeth Kuti's The Sugar Wife are joint winners of the 2006 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.  The prize was presented by one of this year's Judges, award-winning British actress Lindsay Duncan at The Arts Club, Dover Street, London on the 24th February.

The two English playwrights received $6,000 each, splitting the two top cash awards (Winner - $10,000, Special Commendation - $2,000).   Each was also given a de Kooning lithograph made especially for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

The other nine Finalists receive $1,000 each.

• Kay Adshead - Bites
  
• April De Angelis - Wild East
  
• Bathsheba Doran - Living Room In Africa
  
• Melissa James Gibson - Current Nobody
  
• Debbie Tucker Green - Stoning Mary
  
• Linda Marshall Griffiths - Pomegranate
  
• Beth Henley - Ridiculous Fraud
  
• Oni Faida Lampley - Tough Titty
  
• Kira Obolensky - Modern House

Bullmore's Mammals, the first stage play for the London-born actress and writer, premiered at London's Bush Theatre last spring and is currently on tour in England. The work is "a comedy about telling or not telling, the dangers of home and the disproportionately towering presence of children."

The Sugar Wife, Kuti's third play, was premiered by Dublin's Rough Magic theatre company in 2005, a production that was seen at London's Soho Theatre in February 2006. Set in an 1850 Dublin Quaker community, the play tells of a women "torn between her work with the city's poor and her husband's prospering business: a string of oriental teahouses."

Judges for the 2006 awards were actors Blair Brown and Lindsay Duncan, Lincoln Center Theatre dramaturge Anne Cattaneo, Playwrights Horizons artistic director Tim Sanford, Royal National Theatre literary manager Jack Bradley and Newcastle's Northern Stage Chief Executive Erica Whyman.

 This page last updated March 2006