Zinnie Harris

Zinnie Harris's plays include the multi-award-winning Further than the Furthest Thing, produced by the National Theatre/Tron Theatre in 2000 (1999 Peggy Ramsay Playwriting Award, 2001 John Whiting Award, Edinburgh Festival Fringe First award); Nightingale and Chase (Royal Court Theatre, 2001); By Many Wounds (Hampstead Theatre, 1999); and Silver Whale Fish and Master of the House (BBC Radio Four). Solstice, the first in a trilogy of plays, was staged in 2005 by the RSC, who had already presented Midwinter in 2004; the last, Fall, was staged at the Traverse, Edinburgh, in 2008. The Wheel was staged at the Traverse Theatre by the National Theatre of Scotland and was joint winner of the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award 2011. Zinnie Harris has received an Arts Foundation Fellowship for playwriting, and was Writer in Residence at the RSC, 2000-2001. Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), Norwegian poet and playwright, was one of the shapers of modern theatre, who tempered naturalism with an understanding of social responsibility and individual psychology. His earliest major plays, Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867), were large-scale verse dramas, but with Pillars of the Community (1877) he began to explore contemporary issues. There followed A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881) and An Enemy of the People (1882). A richer understanding of the complexity of human impulses marks such later works as The Wild Duck (1885), Rosmersholm (1886), Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892), while the imminence of mortality overshadows his last great plays, John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899).