Rachel De-lahay wins Most Promising Playwright Award

Rachel De-lahay won the Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright at the Evening Standard Awards, held on Sunday 17 November at the Savoy Hotel.

Rachel’s second play Routes, about immigration and exile, and what happens when people fall through the cracks, opened in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in September to a sold out house every night. Described as “vigorous and dynamic’ in the Evening Standard, The Times observed that “The play expresses, more succinctly than journalism, the moral mess surrounding citizenship and criminal law”.

Rachel was originally part of the Royal Court’s Unheard Voices Writers Programme, which aims to support and develop writers whose voices are under-represented on British stages and her debut play at the Royal Court, The Westbridge, opened at the Bussey Building in Peckham in 2011 as part of Theatre Local, before transferring to the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs. It was awarded the Writers’ Guild Award for Best Theatre Play.

Routes was part of the Royal Court’s Jerwood New Playwrights programme, which aims to discover and support the next generation of world class playwrights, supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation. This is the second time Jerwood New Playwrights have supported Rachel’s plays, after her first play The Westbridge in 2011 was also selected to be part of the Jerwood New Playwrights programme.