The announcement was made in a ceremony in New York.
It has been announced that US playwright a.k. payne has been awarded this year’s Susan Smith Blackburn prize for their play Furlough’s Paradise, announced in a ceremony at New York’s Playwright Horizons.
Having been awarded every year since 1978, the prize is the largest and oldest award recognizing women+ who have written works of outstanding quality for the English-speaking theatre.
The ceremony, which took place on the 10th March, celebrated payne and a cohort of eight Finalists. Payne received a cash prize of $25,000, and a signed print by renowned artist Willem de Kooning, created especially for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.
It was kicked off with Playwright and performer Heidi Schreck, a two-time finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, with a monologue from her successful What the Constitution Means to Me.
Talking about the news, a.k. payne remarked, “I am so grateful to receive this award and join a list of some of my favourite writers whose plays have shaken how I understand the world and who have made it possible—through their words transcending space and time and/or their caring and abundant mentorship—for me to write: Katori Hall, Julia Cho, Lynn Nottage, Sarah Ruhl, Benedict Lombe and Paula Vogel to name a very select few.”
Prize executive director Leslie Swackhamer said: “At this moment in our history as a country, and as a Prize which honors women, trans and non-binary writers, we must acknowledge the very real threats that are being aimed at our hard-won freedoms. We must remind ourselves of the power of our voices, and the special magic we create when we lift them at the theatre. Every voice on our stage tonight deserves to be honored, celebrated and heard.”
Payne has described her play as a “lyrical journey about grief, home, and survival.” Furlough’s Paradise tells the story of two cousins and their intertwined yet wildly divergent lives. Sade and Mina, raised like sisters, return to their childhood town for the funeral of their mother and aunt. While Sade is on a three-day furlough from prison and Mina experiences a brief reprieve from her career and life on the West Coast, the two try to make sense of grief, home, love, and kinship. But traumas and resentments from the past, both real and surreal, threaten to pull them apart, all as time ticks towards the correctional officer’s arrival.
Furlough’s Paradise was nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize by Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre which premiered the play in 2024, directed by the Alliance’s Artistic Director, Tinashe Kajese-Bolden. This April, the play will receive its West Coast premiere, also directed by Kajese-Bolden, at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.
In addition, two further prizes were awarded for Special Commendations of $10,000 each, a rare honor given at the discretion of the judges, which went to 49 Days by Haruna Lee, and An Oxford Man by Else Went.
Judges for this year’s prize included: Linda Cho (US) – Tony Award-winning costume designer; Jennifer Ehle (US) – Tony and BAFTA Award-winning actress; Nancy Medina (UK) – Artistic Director of the Bristol Old Vic; Mark Ravenhill (UK) – Acclaimed playwright; George Strus (US) – Founder, Breaking the Binary Theatre; and Indira Varma (UK) – Olivier Award-winning actress.