Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s 2004 production of Bezhiti (Dishnour) led to threats of violence against her and her family. It also has distracted many people from the fierce energy, honesty and clarity of her plays. Kaur Bhatti made her Royal Court debut in 2014 with the beautiful Khandan (Family).

Oscar winner Christopher Hampton is a name that has appeared in many, many, many places. In 1966, England won the world cup and Hampton became the youngest playwright to have a play produced in the commercial theatre in the modern age. Between 1968 and 1970 he was the resident dramatist and Literary Manager at the Royal Court.

Over the last decade, Stef Smith has become one of the UK’s most urgent theatre makers. She is restless, not just in the face of her world’s deep grained political and economic injustices of the highest order but also in the capacity for conventional theatre forms to properly explore those injustices. It is this restlessness that has driven and defined one of the most compelling theatrical biographies of the decade.

David Ireland is a man whose family names makes writing short essays about his paradoxical national identity, biography and work tremendously complicated. His 2016 play Cyprus Avenue directed by Royal Court Artistic Director Vicky Featherstone in a co-production between the Court and Dublin’s Abbey Theatre propelled Ireland to international attention.

Jack Thorne has written the most popular play of the century, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. He has written for television, most recently with His Dark Materials, and won five Bafta Awards including for his series Shades and his remarkable collaboration with Shane Meadows that led to the This is England series 86, 88 and 90.

Playwright, poet, performer, presenter, screenwriter, anthologist and librettist Sabrina Mahfouz has written and produced up to twenty plays in the last ten years. She is a compelling performer, passionate and witty and savage and self-deprecating by turn, and her energy has driven one of the most dizzyingly prolific and formally surprising careers in contemporary British Theatre.

The audio play of A History of Water in the Middle East by Sabrina Mahfouz directed by Stef O’Driscoll is available to listen to now for 6 weeks.