‘A writer of grace and luminosity’
The Stage
Barney Norris is a playwright and novelist. Uniquely varied among his generation in the variety of work he has produced, he has appeared at the Bridge Theatre, the Bush Theatre, on bestseller lists and at the New York Met, as well as presenting work in woods, hospices, village halls and cafes. A catalogue of his writing is available on this site.
He has received the International Theatre Institute’s Award for Excellence, the Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright, a South Bank Sky Arts Times Breakthrough Award, an Evening Standard Progress 1000 Award, a Betty Trask Award, the Northern Ireland One Book Award and a Hawthornden Literary Foundation award. He has been a judge for the Classical Association, Live Canon, the Yale Drama Prize, the RSL Literature Matters Awards, the Somerset Maugham Awards, the British Book Awards and the George Devine Award, among others. His work has been translated into ten languages.
A former chair of the Society of Authors Scriptwriters Committee and member of the SoA Sustainability Committee and the Writers Guild Theatre Negotiating Team, former Artistic Associate at Oxford Playhouse and a former Green party general election candidate, for ten years he ran a touring theatre company named Up In Arms. His training in the theatre was under the founding leadership of the Joint Stock Theatre Company, David Hare, William Gaskill and Max Stafford-Clark, and under the playwright and director Peter Gill; his time spent in South Africa with Athol Fugard was also a formative influence. He has directed productions at the Arcola Theatre, the Lyric Hammersmith, the Watermill Theatre and An Tobar on the Isle of Mull. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Oxford. The author of two book-length studies of artists, his mentor Peter Gill and his father David Owen Norris, he also reviews fiction regularly for the Guardian.
‘High on any list of the best younger British writers’
The Guardian
Barney Norris 