Evan Placey is a London-based playwright who grew up in a liberal, secular Jewish family in Toronto, Canada. He is a graduate of the Central School of Speech and Drama and McGill University and attended the Royal Court Young Writers’ Programme. Placey is now a Creative Writing Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the University of Southampton and also teaches playwriting in prisons and for the National Theatre.

For his plays, he draws inspiration from his life experience or from the news. His debut play Mother of Him premiered at the Courtyard Theatre, London in 2010. Based on a true story, it deals with the Jewish mother of a teenage rapist. For his debut play, Placey won the King’s Cross Award for New Writing, Canada’s Tarragon Theatre’s RBC Under 30 National Playwriting Competition, and the 2011 Samuel French Canadian Play Contest. The play was also produced at the Beit Lessin Theatre in Tel Aviv. It was revived at the Park Theatre in September 2019, directed by Max Lindsay and starring Tracy-Ann Oberman as the mother.

Placey has written many other plays, including Banana Boys (2010), Holloway Jones (2011), Girls Like That (2013), Pronoun (2014), Consensual (2015), and Jekyll & Hyde (2017). His plays have been translated into many languages and won several prizes. For Cat A, Placey won a Literature Matters Award from the Royal Society of Literature in 2018. He also writes for the radio, television, and the cinema. Placey was named on the BBC Talent Hotlist and took part in the BBC TV Drama Writers’ Programme and Channel 4’s 4Screenwriting. His first television script, Soulmates, a drama series, premiered in the UK on Amazon in 2021. Placey also has a debut film currently in development.

Plays

—. Girls Like That. London: Nick Hern Books, 2013.

—. Pronoun. London: Nick Hern Books, 2014.

—. Consensual. London: Nick Hern Books, 2015.

—. Banana Boys. London: Nick Hern Books, 2016.

—. Holloway Jones. London: Nick Hern Books, 2016.

—. Jekyll & Hyde. London: Nick Hern Books, 2017.