Owen McCafferty

Northern Irish playwright

Owen McCafferty (born 1961) is a playwright from Northern Ireland.

Early life

Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, McCafferty in 1961 he was brought up in London from the age of 1 until aged 10 when his parents returned to Belfast. He was educated at St Augustine's Secondary School, the College of Business Studies and then the University of Ulster where he studied Philosophy and History.

Career

His play Scenes from the Big Picture, originally produced in 2003 at the National Theatre in London, earned him the John Whiting Award, the Evening Standard's Charles Wintour Award for New Playwriting and the Meyer-Whitworth Award. It was the first time any playwright had won all three awards in one year.^[1]^[2]

McCafferty has also adapted J P Miller's Days of Wine and Roses but only used the skeleton of the original.

McCafferty's writing features the language and complexities, both comic and tragic, of Belfast life. Like John Millington Synge, McCafferty's dialogue is highly stylized.

McCafferty is a member of Aosdána.^[3]

Plays

I won't dance don't ask me
Mojo Mickybo
Cold Comfort
Freefalling
Shoot the Crow
Closing Time
Scenes from the Big Picture
The Absence of Women
Titanic (Scenes from The British Wreck Commissioner's Inquiry 1912)
Quietly
Unfaithful
Fire Below
Death of a Comedian
Agreement

Screenplays

Ordinary Love (2019)

Films based on his plays

Mickybo and Me

References

^ "irish playography". Archived from the original on 9 October 2007.
^ "Solas Nua". Archived from the original on 28 August 2008. Retrieved 28 August 2008.
^ Mike McCormack elected to Aosdána, tramppress.com, Retrieved June 14, 2018.

External links

Official website

John Whiting Award

1967–1969

Tom Stoppard for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Wole Soyinka for The Interpreters (shared) (1967)
Peter Nichols for A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1967)
Peter Barnes for The Ruling Class and Edward Bond for Narrow Road to the Deep North (shared) (1968)
Howard Brenton for Christie in Love (1969)

1970–1979

Freehold Company and Peter Hulton (joint) for Freehold on Antigone (1970)
Mustapha Matura for As Time Goes By (1971)
Heathcote Williams for AC/DC (1972)
John Arden (1973)
David Rudkin (1974)
David Edgar for Destiny (1975)
David Lan for The Winter Dancers (1976)
David Halliwell and Snoo Wilson for The Glad Hand (shared) (1978)
Stephen Bill (1979)

1980–1989

David Pownall for Beef (1981)
Karim Alrawi for Migrations (1982)
Peter Flannery for Our Friends in the North (1983)
Ron Hutchinson for The Rat in the Skull (1984)
Guy Hibbert for On the Edge and Heidi Thomas for Shamrocks & Crocodiles (shared) (1985)
Nick Dear for The Art of Success (1986)
Iain Heggie for American Bagpipes (1988)
Billy Roche for A Handful of Stars (1989)

1990–1999

Lucy Gannon for Keeping Tom Nice (1990)
Terry Johnson for Imagine Drowning (1991)
Rod Wooden for Your Home in the West (1992)
Martin Crimp for The Treatment and Helen Edmundson for The Clearing (shared) (1993)
Jonathan Harvey for Beautiful Thing (1994)
Joe Penhall for Some Voices (1995)
Ayub Khan-Din for East is East (1996)
Ann Coburn for Get Up and Tie Your Fingers (1997)
Roy Williams for Starstruck (1998/9)

2000–2009

David Greig for The Cosmonaut's Last Message ... and Tanika Gupta for The Waiting Room (shared) (2000)
Zinnie Harris for Further than the Furthest Thing (2001)
Peter Rumney for Jumping on my Shadow (2002)
Rona Munro for Iron (2003)
Owen McCafferty for Scenes from the Big Picture (2004)
Fin Kennedy for How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found (2005)
James Philips for The Rubenstein Kiss and Fraser Grace for Breakfast with Mugabe (shared) (2006)
Dennis Kelly for Taking Care of Baby (2007)
Bryony Lavery for Stockholm (2008)
Alexi Kaye Campbell for The Pride (2009)