Sabrina Mahfouz’s work moves between the stage, the page and the airwaves. A poet, playwright, performer and writer from South London, she has made plays about subjects ranging from a woman chef in prison to the early-2000s UK garage scene, while also writing poetry, editing an anthology and creating work for radio and television. Her career has taken shape across different forms rather than within a single theatrical lane.
From university to the stage
Mahfouz grew up in South London in a British-Egyptian family. Her education combined English Literature and Classics at King’s College London, where she gained a BA, with an MA in International Politics and Diplomacy at SOAS, University of London. She began her working life in the Civil Service Fast Stream Programme, including work at the Ministry of Defence and other departments, before leaving to concentrate on creative writing.
Her first short play, That Boy, won the Westminster Prize for New Playwrights in 2010. In 2011, Mahfouz received a Creative in Residence Award at the Hospital Club in London and took part in the Old Vic New Voices TS Eliot exchange programme in New York. That year she presented Dry Ice, her first solo show, at Underbelly during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Directed by David Schwimmer, it was nominated for The Stage Award for Best Solo Performance and later transferred to the Bush Theatre in London and Contact Theatre in Manchester.
These early projects established a pattern in her career: writing and performance developed alongside one another, and work made for a particular festival or theatre could travel to other venues. In 2012, One Hour Only was selected for the Old Vic New Voices and IdeasTap Edinburgh Award and played at Underbelly. That year Mahfouz also wrote Clean for the Traverse Theatre’s Breakfast Plays; it won a Herald Angel Award. She later expanded it into a longer work, staged at the Traverse and Oran Mór in Glasgow before transferring to New York’s 59E59 Theaters in 2014.
Chef and the range of her theatre work
A 2013 Sky Academy Arts Scholarship enabled Mahfouz to develop poetry that was collected in The Clean Collection, published by Bloomsbury, and to create Chef. The solo play, performed by Jade Anouka, follows a woman chef in prison. Its kitchen setting offers a space in which the character can exercise skill and control; the story also brings questions of power, resilience and redemption into focus.
Chef played at Underbelly in 2014 and transferred to Soho Theatre in June 2015. It won a Fringe First Award and was shortlisted for the Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Award, the Brighton Fringe Award for Excellence and the Holden Street Theatres’ Adelaide Fringe Award. Anouka received The Stage Award for Acting Excellence. The play’s recognition was not limited to one production: its awards and transfer chart the growing reach of Mahfouz’s stage work.
Her writing also includes a 2014 play about free speech in Egypt, commissioned by the National Theatre and performed by young people as part of its Connections festival. In 2016, several of her plays were produced in the UK and internationally. Among them were With a Little Bit of Luck, for Paines Plough; SLUG, for nabokov; the love i feel is red, for Tobacco Factory Theatre; Caldarium, for Theatre Uncut and Teater Grob; SLoW, for KVS Brussels; Layla’s Room, for Theatre Centre; and Battleface, for the Bush Theatre.
Poetry, publishing and work beyond the theatre
With a Little Bit of Luck places Nadia, a young woman, amid the UK garage scene of the early 2000s. The play draws on a specific musical setting while following a character’s experience of change and belonging. Mahfouz also adapted the work for radio, with a version broadcast on BBC Radio 1Xtra. The stage play was published by Methuen Bloomsbury in 2016, alongside other scripts and collections that document the breadth of her writing.
Her books include the poetry collection How You Might Know Me (2016) and A History of Water in the Middle East (2019). She co-wrote Metamorphosis with Sami Ibrahim and Laura Lomas, drawing on Ovid, and the play was published in 2021. As an editor, Mahfouz brought together The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write (2017), a collection of writing by British Muslim women. She also contributed an essay to The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla.
Mahfouz’s work extends into broadcasting and other performance forms. Her short television drama Breaking the Code was produced in 2016 by BBC3, BBC Taster and BBC Drama. She has presented Power Lines, a performance-poetry documentary for BBC Radio 4, and her work has included the television programmes Railway Nation: A Journey in Verse and We Belong Here. Her writing has also reached dance and opera, including Rosalind with James Cousins Company, I Imagine with Aakash Odedra Company and The Dying Swan with the Royal Ballet.
Recognition and creative roles
In 2018, Mahfouz was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature through its 40 Under 40 initiative. That year she won the King’s Art & Culture Alumni Award and an Offie for Best Production for Young People for Ziraffa Giraffa. Her earlier honours include the 2013 Sky Academy Arts Scholarship and the 2014 Fringe First for Chef. These distinctions sit alongside a range of professional roles: she has been playwright-in-residence at the Bush Theatre, poet-in-residence at Cape Farewell, a writer at Liberty for Liberty UK and a Global Shaper with the World Economic Forum.
The range matters because Mahfouz’s practice is not confined to writing scripts. She performs poetry, contributes to anthologies, edits collections and works with theatre, broadcasters and companies in other art forms. The different settings have given her writing multiple routes to audiences, from a solo show in Edinburgh to a radio play and an anthology bringing together British Muslim women’s voices.
Why Sabrina Mahfouz deserves a place in British Legacy
Sabrina Mahfouz deserves a place in British Legacy for the range and reach of a body of work rooted in British cultural life. From Dry Ice and Chef to With a Little Bit of Luck, she has created theatre that has been staged at venues including Underbelly, the Traverse and Soho Theatre, and that has gained recognition through awards and transfers. Her work also crosses into television, radio, poetry, dance and opera. That movement between forms is a concrete contribution to contemporary British culture: audiences can encounter her writing in a theatre, a poetry collection, a broadcast or a performance made with another company.
Her contribution also includes making room for other writers and performers. Editing The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write brought together work by British Muslim women in a published collection; her play for the National Theatre Connections festival was performed by young people. These projects complement a career that includes both solo performance and collaborative work. Mahfouz’s British-Egyptian background and her writing across different forms are part of that story, but her place here rests on identifiable achievements: plays produced in Britain and abroad, a recognised poetry practice, work made for national broadcasters and an anthology that widened the range of voices gathered between two covers.
Sources
Adapted in part from Sabrina Mahfouz by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.
