Six Plays By Black and Asian Women Writers by Kadija George

Six Plays By Black and Asian Women Writers by Kadija George

A landmark collection of plays for stage, screen and radio, Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers has become a seminal collection for libraries, drama schools and educational institutions.Edited by Kadija George, Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers includes a revised introduction together with the original essays from the 1993 edition.Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers includes writers who have now gone on to achieve national recognition with work produced on film, television, radio and stage working with some of the most distinguished actors, directors and producers of African and Asian descent in Britain.This anthology was an important milestone in British theatre being the first book to offer diverse female role models both by the playwrights themselves and through the characters in their plays.Since the first publication of Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers in 1993, Meera Syal has become an international name as an actor, writer and producer, with film, TV, fiction and theatre 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 write numerous plays such as staged at the National Theatre and many others. She is now considered to be the 'godmother of Black theatre' in the UK. Maya Chowdhry continues to be experimental with her work in multimedia formats, (has co-edited a book with another of our playwrights, 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 co-founded Kali Theatre, and we have published two more of her plays, namely Mistaken and Homing Birds. She has also published a novel, The Hope Chest, and received a Royal Literary Society Fellowship; Trish Cooke has a successful career writing books for children and was a Children's TV presenter for several years. Not to mention the essays by Bernardine Evaristo who jointly won the Booker prize for Girl, Woman, Other in 2019 with novelist Margaret Atwood.

"The essence of theatre, according to Stuart Griffiths, lies not in the word so much as its ability to affect us, touch us so that we feel pleasure or pain, force us to identify with it by reflecting something which has significance to our life.. Black theatre in Britain is surviving. Though few plays have made it to West End stages, productions on the fringe have had continuing success. These plays attract a predominantly Black audience and contain all the elements of the greatest drama: symbolism, language, conflict, rhythm. This is popular theatre at its best using every means necessary to awaken residues of oral traditions buried in the depths of the race memory." Valerie Small, The Importance Of Oral Tradition To Black Theatre (1993) "The new writing initiatives of the late 20th century grew out of a need to haul white elitist (male-dominated) theatre into a multi-cultural world wherein the plays staged were more accurately reflective of surrounding society, demographically and culturally... After the funding decimation of many Black and Asian theatre groups in the late 1980s, the cultivation of writers from marginalised social groups comprised an aspect of dismantling institutional racism... As May Joseph has pointed out, it was not until the late 20th century that 'the absence of Black women as subjects with agency' was challenged and countered by the work of black women playwrights. The importance of including and perpetuating indigenous Black British drama in the mainstream theatrescape can be neither underestimated nor over-emphasised. It provides a key cultural site wherein ethnicities and experiences who may not otherwise meet are directly exposed to each other's cultural practices... Black drama exposes mainstream (predominantly white) theatre-goers to aspects of Black British cultural input that is as indigenous to contemporary British cultural identity as that provided by white playwrights. It provides Black audiences with authentically rendered cultural representations which have not as yet been able to develop a flourishing continuum in Britain's cultural psyche." Deirdre Osborne, A Recent Look At Black Women Playwrights (2005)

About the editor Kadija George is a literary activist, editor and publisher. Of Sierra Leonean descent, she read West African studies at Birmingham University, then became a freelance journalist, specialising in black arts, black British Literature and women's issues. In the mid-1990s, she worked for the Centreprise Literature Development Project as the Black Literature Development Coordinator and set up the newspaper, Calabash. She left there in 1998. In 2001, she became founder and managing editor of Sable magazine. Kadija has edited anthologies of black writing, including Burning Words, Flaming Images (1996) - poems and stories from writers of African descent; IC3: the Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (2000), co-edited with Courttia Newland; and Write Black, Write British (2005). She is also the series editor for Inscribe, an imprint of Peepal Tree Press. Her first full collection of poems, Irki, was published in 2013. She has worked on projects with adults and young people, including one for the Commission for Racial Equality, and has been Writer in Residence for Vision Quest in Atlanta, US. She organises The Sable Writers' Hot Spot - trips for writers abroad and established Sable LitFest in 2005. She teaches creative writing and journalism. Her own writing appears in various anthologies and has been broadcast on radio and performed at a number of venues. She is a George Bell Fellow, Kennedy Center for Arts Management Fellow, and General Secretary of African Writers Abroad. She has won various awards for her work, including Cosmopolitan Woman of Achievement (1994), and Woman of the Millennium (2000). Kadija George lives between the UK and the USA. Performance Rights Information A HERO'S WELCOME: The Agency Ltd MY SISTER-WIFE: Rochelle Stevens and Co RUNNING DREAM: Curtis Brown Ltd. MONSOON/SONG FOR A SANCTUARY/LEONORA'S DANCE: Write to the Author (c) c/o Aurora Metro Books

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780951587720
ISBN 10	0951587722
Title	Six Plays By Black and Asian Women Writers
Author	Kadija George
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Aurora Metro Publications
Year published	2022-08-30
Number of pages	228
Prizes	Short-listed for Raymond Williams Publishing Prize 1994
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.