Bruntwood Prize Winner Reflects The Times We Live In

Bruntwood Prize

Wish List by Katherine Soper, who currently works in a perfumery on Regent Street in London, was today – 17 November 2015 – announced as the winner of the 10th anniversary Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting 2015 – Europe’s biggest playwriting prize. She wins a prize of £16,000, and a residency at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, where today’s award ceremony took place and the process towards production begins.

Wish List is Katherine Soper’s first play. She said: “This is the best boost of writerly confidence I could imagine.”

From the Guardian

Wish List is the story of a teenage carer, Tamsin, who takes work in a warehouse on a zero-hours contract to help support her younger brother, Dean, when his employment and support allowance (ESA) is cut. (“He has been found fit to work when he clearly isn’t,” Soper states.)

“At its heart it’s about the attitude we have to work, as a country; the attitude we have towards the unemployed and the attitude we have towards the rights of those who are in work,” says Soper. She spent summers doing warehouse work in between studying English literature at Cambridge University and became interested in their “power structures”.

“A huge company will hire this warehouse, who then hire a temping agency, who then hire me … You start to see everyone taking their cut, and the person doing the labour at the bottom.” The title of the play is designed to evoke Amazon wish-lists. “It’s a very wistful play. It’s about possibilities that could have presented themselves … It’s about the wishes that we might have for other ways our life might go.”