Marina Carr

A creative and dynamic playwright, Marina Carr grew up in the Midlands of Ireland. As a child, she was influenced by her parents' artistic endeavors: her father was a playwright and musician, and her mother was a poet.

Carr's love for theatre began at an early age. In the preface to her first collection of plays, she describes building a theatre in her family's shed and creating violent and bloody stories full of robbers: "Everyone suffered: the least you could hope to get away with was a torturing. And still we all lived happily ever after."

Carr's childhood influences--both the themes of her imagination and the location in which she lived--impacted her writing. Many of her plays have female protagonists negotiating complicated and even traumatic relationships. The mothers are awful and families fall apart. The harsh landscape of the Irish Midlands weighs on the characters and Carr incorporates Irish folklore into many of her works.

Professionally, Carr's plays have often premiered at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and several have gone on to have runs at the Royal Court or West End in London. She has won several awards for her work, including the Susan Smith Blackburn prize and the E. M. Forster Award.