Papatango Theatre Company in association with London's Finborough Theatre has announced the winner of its 2012 playwriting competition.
From 700 international entries, the winning play chosen was Pack by 51-year-old Louise Monaghan, the first play she has written to receive a full production. The play will be performed at the Finborough from 27 November to 22 December and will also be published by Nick Hern Books.
Monaghan discovered a love for writing through writing letters to her sister when she was dying of skin cancer in 1992 and enrolled on a correspondence course.
She said, "It wasn’t until 2001 that I decided to write plays. There are very few opportunities available to anyone over thirty and I quickly discovered it’s very difficult to learn how to write a play once you reach forty. But with a passion for theatre-making and a fierce determination to succeed, I began to make slow, modest progress."
Monaghan won one of three £8,000 runner-up prizes in the 2011 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting, hosted by Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre, for her play Shadow Play, and her first radio play Alone in the Garden with You was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 earlier this year.
She added, "It’s taken more than ten years to achieve this level of success and I hope that my story will inspire other writers—particularly those of ‘a certain age’—to persevere."
Pack features four women playing bridge while a BNP rally gathers momentum outside, but beliefs and loyalties are tested to the limit when the sone of one of them is implicated in a brutal racist attack that leaves an eleven-year-old Pakistani boy close to death.
Second place in the competition went to Everyday Maps for Everyday Use by Tom Morton-Smith, which will be performed from 4 December for a three-week run. There will be staged readngs of the third and fourth place plays Back Home Contemplation by May Sumbwanyambe and Photos of You Sleeping by Jane Wainwright on 10 and 17 December respectively.