Winsome Pinnock – författare

With Black Plays, Yvonne Brewster clearly demonstrated the need for a regular anthology to record the vitality of Black playwriting. For her second volume she has selected The Dragon Can't Dance, adapted from a novel by Earl Lovelace in which the inhabitants of Port of Spain, Trinidad, prepare to live out their dreams on Carnival Night; Winsome Pinnock's A Rock in Water, an energetic chronicle play about activist Claudia Jones, one of the founders of the Notting Hill Carnival; Blood, Sweat and Fears by Maria Oshodi which focuses on the problems of the ten per cent of Britain's black population who suffer from sickle cell anaemia and Job Rocking by Rastafarian poet Benjamin Zephaniah, a 'dub' opera set in and around a new style job club designed to sell the idea of work to the unemployed.

A kaleidoscopic look at black female drug smugglers shuttling between Jamaica and London, sometimes ending up in jail, never meeting the top people, dreaming of a new life.

When a young man jumps in front of the train Cyrus is driving, the enigmatic circumstances prompt him to search for answers. Pursuing the truth of Sonny's final hours, Cyrus is led to laundrette worker Christine, as the past begins to catch up with them all.An evocative thriller about the power of guilt, the quest for atonement and the fragility of human relationships, Winsome Pinnock's One Under was first performed in 2005, and reimagined in a touring Graeae and Theatre Royal Plymouth production in 2019.

A landmark collection of plays for stage, screen and radio. While other anthologies of plays by writers of African descent have been published, Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers (1st edition 1993; new revised edition 2005) was the first drama anthology to represent women alone.Comedy, poetry, history and magic combined with themes of a social and spiritual nature are the themes and styles evident in Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers, a seminal collection of plays for stage, radio and television by Rukhsana Ahmad, Maya Chowdhry, Trish Cooke, Winsome Pinnock, Meera Syal and Zindika.Edited and introduced by Kadija George, Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers includes: Essays on theatre and writing workshop; The Importance of Oral Tradition to Black Theatre by Valerie Small; A survey, A Recent Look at Black Women Playwrights by Deirdre Osborne.This anthology's key characteristics are effortless depictions of characters devoid of stereotypical images and typecast roles and the playwrights' approach to unconventional issues.Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers represents just some of the writers who have achieved national recognition with work produced on stage, television and radio by some of the most distinguished actors, directors and producers of African and Asian descent that the arts field in Britain has seen.The anthology heralds the significance that young women of African and Asian descent now have more role models to look towards, reinforced by actors and writers-in-residence going into educational institutions and more diverse organisations and situations, from the BBC-supported writer-in-residence projects, with the likes of performer/artists Rommi Smith and Erika Tan, to performance poet/multi-media artist Dorothea Smartt as the Brixton Market Poet-in-Residence.Since the first publication of Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers: Meera Syal has become an international name, with novel, TV and stage credits including the popular musical, Bombay Dreams, debuting in the West End; After receiving a writer-in-residence fellowship at Cambridge University, Winsome Pinnock has gone on to produce further plays staged at much-respected fringe theatres such as the Tricycle Theatre; Maya Chowdhry continues to be experimental with her work in multimedia formats, has co-edited a book with Nina Rapi, Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender and Performance and is currently working on a coedited anthology of women's writing in the north of England, 'Bitch Lit'; Zindika has written for dance theatre, for Adzido, and co-edited a book, When Will I See You Again with Natalie Smith; Rukshana Ahmad has published a novel, The Hope Chest, and received a Royal Literary Fellowship; Trish Cooke has a successful career writing books for children.Yet moving from the margins and into the mainstream continues to happen too slowly. More than ten years since the first publication of this anthology, the fight and funding for a 'Black'-owned and -managed theatre in Britain is still being argued for, and unfortunately, has barely moved.

Clean Break is a British theatre company set up in 1979 by two women in prison. It exists to tell the stories of women with experience of the criminal justice system and to transform women’s lives through theatre.Over 40 years, Clean Break has commissioned some of the most progressive and brilliant women writers to write ground-breaking plays, alongside developing the writing skills of the women they work with in its London studios and in prisons. This is a collection of monologues from this canon.Rebel Voices: Monologues for Women by Women celebrates the opportunities inherent when women represent themselves. Offering female performers a diverse set of monologues reflecting a range of characters in age, ethnicity and lived experience, the material is drawn from a mix of published and unpublished works. This book is for any performer who does not see themselves represented in mainstream plays, for lovers of radical women’s theatre and for rebels everywhere who believe that the act of speaking and being heard can create change.

The Methuen Drama Book of Plays by Black British Writers provides an essential anthology of six of the key plays that have shaped the trajectory of British black theatre from the late-1970s to the present day. In doing so it charts the journey from specialist black theatre companies to the mainstream, including West End success, while providing a cultural and racial barometer for Britain during the last forty years.It opens with Mustapha Matura's 1979 play Welcome Home Jacko which in its depiction of a group of young unemployed West Indians was one of the first to explore issues of youth culture, identity and racial and cultural identification. Jackie Kay's Chiaroscuro examines debates about the politics of black, mixed race and lesbian identities in 1980s Britain, and from the 1990s Winsome Pinnock's Talking in Tongues engages with the politics of feminism to explore issues of black women's identity in Britian and Jamaica. From the first decade of the twenty-first century the three plays include Roy Williams' seminal pub-drama Sing Yer Hearts Out for the Lads, exploring racism and identity against the backdrop of the World Cup; Kwame Kwei-Armah's National Theatre play of 2004, Fix Up, about black cultural history and progress in modern Britain, and finally Bola Agbage's terrific 2007 debut, Gone Too Far!, which examines questions of identity and tensions between Africans and Caribbeans living in Britain. Edited by Lynnette Goddard, this important anthology provides an essential introduction to the last forty years of British black theatre.

'I am the slave ship. Wrecked. Empty. I am a shark, livid with the desire for blood. I am the sea, boiling with fury.'On the set of a new film about Victorian artist J.M.W. Turner, young actress Lou is haunted by an unresolved history. Meanwhile, in 1840, Londoners Lucy and Thomas try to come to terms with the meaning of freedom.Moving between London past and present, Winsome Pinnock's astonishing play retells British history through the prism of the slave trade. Fusing fact with fiction, and the powerfully personal with the fiercely political, Rockets and Blue Lights asks who owns our past – and who has the right to tell its stories?Winner of the 2018 Alfred Fagon Award, the play opened at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in 2020, directed by Miranda Cromwell. It transferred to the National Theatre, London, in 2021.'Rockets and Blue Lights places at its center one of the nineteenth century's most famous paintings: J. M. W. Turner's "The Slave Ship". Moving between several sets of characters and ranging from the 1800s to the present, this intricately plotted drama compels us to confront the horrors of our shared past. It does so with compassion and wit, never once compromising Pinnock's vision of theater as the communal creation of new, stranger, and perhaps truer histories' Windham-Campbell Prize committee, on awarding Winsome Pinnock a Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama in 2022

'We believe it is important to confront the reality of history. We are trying to bring hidden histories into the light. No more secrets.'Soon after inheriting her family's stately home, eccentric artist Fenella Harford discovers a stash of hidden diaries, and she enlists a young academic, Marva, to confirm their identity.Joined by Marva's brilliant but overlooked mentor, Abi, the three women come together to seek the truth, soon realising that the secrets at the heart of Harford Hall are darker than they could have imagined.Winsome Pinnock's play The Authenticator is a gripping psychological thriller and a searing exploration of the haunting history of colonialism. It opened at the National Theatre, London, in 2026, directed by Miranda Cromwell.

Six plays by some of the most exciting and distinctive female voices in British theatre, exploring the heartbreaking truth about the lives of women in the criminal justice system.The plays were commissioned and premiered by Clean Break, a theatre and education company working with women whose lives have been affected by the criminal justice system.Included in this volume:Fatal Light by Chloë Moss, about a young mother's inability to cope with separation from her daughter.Taken by Winsome Pinnock, about a mother confronted by the child she had to give up.Dream Pill by Rebecca Prichard, about two children forced into prostitution.Doris Day by E V Crowe, about two police officers and their different expectations of the job.Dancing Bears by Sam Holcroft, about the twisted loyalties and violence in teenage gangs.That Almost Unnameable Lust by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, about a writer holding workshops with older women in a prison.The plays were first performed at Soho Theatre, London, in November 2010.

‘What doctor know about our illness? Just give you pills to sick you stomach and a doctor certificate. What they know about a black woman soul?’In North London, Del and Viv are soul-sick. Del doesn’t want to be at home; staying out late – 3 p.m.-the-next-day late – is more her thing. Viv scours her schoolbooks trying to find a trace of herself between their lines.When Enid takes her daughters to the local obeah woman for some traditional Caribbean soul-healing, secrets are spilled. There’s no turning back for Del, Viv and Enid as they negotiate the frictions between their countries and cultures.Two generations. Three incredible women. Winsome Pinnock's play Leave Taking is an epic story of what we leave behind in order to find home. It premiered in 1987, and was revived at the Bush Theatre, London, in 2018, in a production directed by the Bush’s Artistic Director, Madani Younis.Winsome Pinnock has written numerous plays, including Talking in Tongues, for which she won the George Devine and Pearson Best New Play Awards.‘The godmother of Black British playwrights’ Guardian