Janice Okoh won the Bruntwood Playwrighting Competition in 2011 with her play Three Birds, which was staged at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in 2013, before transferring to the Bush Theatre, London. The play was shortlisted for the Verity Bargate Award and the Alfred Fagon Award.

Her other plays include The Gift (Theatre Royal, Stratford East, 2020) and Egusi Soup (Menagerie Theatre Company & Eastern Angles, 2009).

Antonio Onetti is a well-known Spanish screenwriter, playwright and theatre director. He studied Drama at the Real Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático de Madrid. He has worked as a dramaturgy and dramatic writing teacher.

He has worked in the Spanish television and film industry for over 25 years, being a screenwriter in over 20 projects, such as The Cathedral of the Sea, Cuéntame cómo pasó, 20-N: Los últimos días de Franco, or Lola, la película. He was also the co-creator of two very successful series: Amar en tiempos revueltos and Amar es para siempre.

As a playwright, he has staged and published all of his plays in Spain, although some have also been staged in other European countries, Latin America and Africa. He has been translated into English, French, Portuguese, Arabic and Romanian.

Joe Orton was an English playwright and author. His public career was short but prolific, lasting from 1964 until his death three years later. During this brief period he shocked, outraged, and amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies.

His first play to be staged, Entertaining Mr Sloane, won the London Critics’ ‘Variety’ Award as the best play of 1964. Loot, his second play to be staged, won the Evening Standard Drama Award for the best play of 1966. The Ruffian on the Stair and The Erpingham Camp were performed as a double bill at the Royal Court Theatre in June 1967 under the title Crimes of Passion. His television plays, The Good and Faithful Servant and Funeral Games, were shown in 1967 and 1968. What the Butler Saw, his last play, was staged in 1969, and won a 1970 ‘Obie’ Award for the best off-Broadway foreign play in New York.

Both Entertaining Mr Sloane and Loot have been filmed. Orton also wrote a screenplay for the Beatles which was never filmed, but was subsequently published as Up Against It. The novels, Head to Toe, Between Us Girls, The Boy Hairdresser and Lord Cucumber, and the play Fred & Madge were published posthumously.

George Orwell (the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair) (1903–1950) was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His works of fiction include Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), while his non-fiction includes The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Homage to Catalonia (1938).

Hugh Osborne is a former university lecturer, now an actor and writer. He has appeared in numerous tours and West End shows, and his adaptation of Diary of a Nobody was a hit when it premiered at Royal & Derngate, Northampton, in 2011.

Jimmy Osborne is a playwright and screenwriter. His plays include Maisie Says She Loves Me (Lincoln Performing Arts Centre & Paines Plough Roundabout, 2016; VAULT Festival 2017); The Cement Garden, adaptated with David Aula from Ian McEwan's novel (VAULT Festival 2014); An Empty Seat (Stephen Joseph Theatre, 2014); The Room Inside (BBC Writersroom Playwriting Award); and Meat (Theatre503, London, 2012).

Thomas Ostermeier is a German theatre director, acclaimed for his innovative and often iconoclastic productions of classic and contemporary plays. He is the Artistic Director of the Schaubühne.