Moira Buffini is is an English author, dramatist, director, and actor. Her works include the critically acclaimed and BAFTA-nominated The Dig, Jane Eyre; Byzantium, Dinner, and the Olivier Award Winner Handbagged. Buffini was co-creator and showrunner of the TV series Harlots, and a founding member of the Monsterists, a group of playwrights who promote new writing of large scale work in the British theatre. Songlight was Buffini's debut novel and was Winner of the YA Book Prize. It has sold in 17 countries, and The Torch Trilogy is now in development as both a TV series and theatre production. Buffini was born in England, to Irish parents, and schooled in Wales. In 2014 she was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Buffini currently lives in London. Nikolai Erdman was born in 1902, and began working in the theatre during the period of relative creative freedom which followed the Russian Revolution. He helped to found the Moscow Theatre of Satire in 1924, and Meyerhold directed his first play, The Mandate, at his own recently formed theatre in 1925; but The Suicide was banned before its dress rehearsal in 1929, and Erdman was exiled to Siberia from 1933 to 1940. He wrote little original work following his rehabilitation, although he joined Yuri Lyubimov at the newly founded Taganka Theatre in 1964. He died in 1970. The Suicide was first performed in Britain by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1979, three years before it received a belated Russian premiere.