Tony Juniper: conservation, campaigning and public service
From rainforest campaigns and parrot conservation to the chairmanship of Natural England, Tony Juniper has worked to bring nature into public debate and policy.
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Caroline Lucas: bringing Green politics into Parliament
From campaigning and European politics to Brighton Pavilion, Caroline Lucas helped establish the Green Party of England and Wales as a visible parliamentary presence.
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Chris Packham: bringing wildlife into view
From The Really Wild Show to Springwatch, the naturalist and broadcaster has used television and campaigning to draw attention to wildlife and its protection.
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Jonathon Porritt: making sustainability a public issue
From the Ecology Party and Friends of the Earth to national policy and Forum for the Future, Porritt has spent decades arguing that environmental limits belong at the centre of political and economic life.
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George Monbiot: Journalism, Politics and the Case for Rewilding
The English journalist and author has used investigative reporting, books and campaigning to challenge how society treats nature, land and political power.
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James Lovelock: instruments, Gaia and a contested climate legacy
The English chemist’s inventions helped reveal atmospheric pollution; his Gaia hypothesis changed how many people think about life and the Earth, even as his scientific and public views drew debate.
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David Attenborough: bringing the natural world into view
From BBC programme-maker and controller to the voice of landmark wildlife series, David Attenborough has made natural history a defining part of British television.
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Rachel Carson and the British reach of Silent Spring
Rachel Carson was American, but her 1962 book challenged readers far beyond the United States. Its warnings about pesticides became part of Britain’s environmental debate.
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Alistair Beaton: political satire from stage to screen
The Glasgow-born playwright and satirist has written about spin, war, climate change and the institutions of public life.
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Mike Bartlett: British theatre’s present tense
From the Royal Court to the National Theatre, Mike Bartlett has put family life, politics and the pressures of modern Britain on stage.
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Tom Wells: working-class lives on stage
The playwright’s Jumpers for Goalposts and The Kitchen Sink find comedy and conflict in a football team and a family home.
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David Greig: theatre shaped by distance, place and politics
The Scottish playwright’s work ranges from intimate Edinburgh comedy to international stories, adaptations and a long period leading the Royal Lyceum Theatre.
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April De Angelis: writing women into the theatrical record
From her beginnings as an actress with Monstrous Regiment to plays for Britain’s leading stages, De Angelis has ranged across historical drama, contemporary comedy, radio, television and opera.
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Ella Hickson
The British playwright and director whose work ranges from a family story shaped by oil to an examination of power in theatre.
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Mark Ravenhill: theatre that refuses easy answers
From Shopping and Fucking to Ben and Imo, the English playwright has moved between contemporary drama, music theatre, comedy and work for young audiences.
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Alistair Beaton: satire across stage, screen and radio
The Scottish-born playwright and writer has made political language, power and public life the material of comedy.
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Caryl Churchill: remaking the possibilities of British theatre
From Cloud 9 and Top Girls to later experiments in fragmented form, Caryl Churchill has made power, identity and social change central to a distinctive body of work.
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Tarell Alvin McCraney: a transatlantic life in theatre
From the Royal Court and Young Vic to the Royal Shakespeare Company, McCraney’s career has connected American storytelling with British stages.
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Philip Ridley: a storyteller across stage, screen and page
From The Pitchfork Disney to children’s novels and films, the East London artist has worked across forms without confining himself to one.
Read the entryMoira Buffini
In Handbagged and Gabriel, political history and wartime occupation shape intimate human dramas.
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Martin Crimp: making new forms for the stage
From his first play at Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre to international opera, Martin Crimp has tested how stories are told and who gets to tell them.
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Hanif Kureishi: writing Britain’s changing identities
From My Beautiful Laundrette to The Buddha of Suburbia, Kureishi has made race, class, desire and belonging part of a distinctive British literary and screen career.
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Dennis Potter: the writer who changed British television
From the Nigel Barton plays to The Singing Detective, Potter joined popular culture, political argument and imaginative storytelling in work that still resists easy categories.
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Winsome Pinnock: writing Black British lives for the stage
From Leave Taking to later work across theatre, radio and television, Pinnock has brought stories of migration, identity and belonging into British drama.
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Abi Morgan: writing drama across stage, screen and television
From the play Tender to The Hour, The Split and The Iron Lady, the Welsh writer has built a career moving between intimate lives and public events.
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John Webster: the playwright who saw the skull beneath the skin
A Jacobean dramatist of intricate plots and unsettling tragedy, Webster made moral uncertainty and human cruelty central to two enduring works for the English stage.
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Christopher Hampton: from the Royal Court to the Academy Awards
A playwright, screenwriter and translator, Hampton has moved between original drama and adaptations for stage and screen, earning major awards in both theatre and film.
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James Graham: drama at the heart of public life
From This House and Ink to Dear England and Sherwood, the playwright has made political and social questions compelling subjects for British theatre and television.
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Rona Munro: theatre, history and the lives behind the stories
From the prison drama Iron to The James Plays, the Scottish writer has moved between contemporary questions and the histories of Scotland’s monarchs.
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Roy Williams: writing Britain’s stories for stage and screen
From football terraces and boxing gyms to the Windrush generation, the playwright’s work brings race, class and national identity into focus.
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Mike Bartlett: writing Britain in the present tense
From the constitutional speculation of King Charles III to the family tensions of Love, Love, Love, Bartlett’s plays turn contemporary questions into live drama.
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Torben Betts
The English playwright moves between dark comedy, social realism and political drama, with works staged across Britain and abroad.
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Inua Ellams: poetry, theatre and journeys between places
The Nigerian-born British poet and playwright draws on migration, memory and shared spaces, from The 14th Tale to Barber Shop Chronicles.
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Timberlake Wertenbaker: history, myth and the stage
In plays including Our Country’s Good and The Love of the Nightingale, Wertenbaker uses historical and mythic settings to examine power, dignity and whose voices are heard.
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Edward Bond: theatre, violence and the limits of society
From the censorship battle over Saved to the nuclear landscapes of The War Plays, Bond made theatre a place to examine how societies produce and confront violence.
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Dennis Kelly: theatre, moral choices and collective responsibility
From the teenagers of DNA to the family at the centre of Orphans, Dennis Kelly’s plays examine what people do when loyalty and responsibility collide.
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Howard Brenton: Theatre in the argument about Britain
From early experimental plays to The Romans in Britain and Never So Good, Brenton has repeatedly put political power and public life on stage.
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Peter Shaffer: the playwright behind Equus and Amadeus
From early stage successes to Tony-winning plays and Oscar-winning screenwriting, Shaffer made British theatre a platform for probing questions about belief, power and artistic genius.
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Tom Stoppard: the playwright who made ideas theatrical
From a childhood shaped by war and exile to plays about love, history and political freedom, Stoppard brought intellectual curiosity to the British stage and screen.
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Martin McDonagh: Irish stories, British stages and dark comedy
Born in London to Irish parents, Martin McDonagh built an international career across theatre and film, moving between stories rooted in Galway and work set elsewhere.
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