David Edgar’s original plays for the RSC include Destiny (1976), Maydays (1983), Pentecost (1994), Written on the Heart (2014) and most recently The New Real (2024).  His plays for the National Theatre include Entertaining Strangers (1988) The Shape of the Table (1990), Albert Speer (2000) and Playing with Fire (2005). His RSC adaptations include Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby (1980-1), and A Christmas Carol (2017-2022). He writes regularly for the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Prospect, Byline Times and other periodicals. In 1989 he founded Britain's first graduate playwriting course, at Birmingham.  His book about playwriting, How Plays Work, was published in 2009. He is a founder member of the British Theatre Consortium. 

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Chris Megson is Reader in Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway University of London. His teaching and research focuses on post-war and contemporary British playwriting, documentary and verbatim theatre, and theatre censorship. His books include Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present (co-edited with Alison Forsyth; Palgrave, 2009), Decades of Modern British Playwriting: the 1970s (Methuen Drama, 2012), and Theatre Censorship in Contemporary Europe: Silence and Protest (co-edited with Anne Etienne; University of Exeter Press, 2024). He is Series Editor of Playwriting and the Contemporary: Critical Collaborations (Liverpool University Press), and Methuen Drama Student Editions.

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Dan Rebellato is a playwright and academic. His plays for stage and radio, including Here’s What I Did With My Body One Day, Static, Chekhov in Hell, Cavalry, Emily Rising, My Life Is A Series of People Saying Goodbye, You & Me, Restless Dreams (shortlisted for the Tinniswood Award), and Plum in Prison. His adaptations include Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend and Radio 4’s award-winning adaptation of Emile Zola’s 20-volume novel sequence under the title Emile Zola: Blood, Sex & Money. His how-to guide, Playwriting, has been published by Bloomsbury/National Theatre. He is Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway University of London and his books include 1956 and All That, Theatre & Globalization, and Modern British Playwriting 2000-2009. ​​

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Julie Wilkinson is a writer, actor and academic from Manchester.  After taking a post-graduate training course at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School under Nat Brenner in the late 1970s, she went on to perform and write as a member of two co-operative theatre companies, Red Ladder and New Perspectives.  As a free-lancer she has written extensively for stage, radio and television and continues to write.  Julie taught creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University for over twenty years.  She has been an active trades unionist, in the Writer's Guild and the University and College Union, and has two grown-up daughters.

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Jane Woddis is a cultural policy researcher who has worked professionally in theatre-in-education, community arts and other community-based organisations. She is an Associate Fellow in the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, University of Warwick and has taken part in grant-funded research on theatre policy, repertoire and audiences, and on arts education; as well as conducting evaluations for arts organisations and linking artists with academics for collaborative projects. She is guest-co-editor of Artists' Narratives in Cultural Policy and Management Research, a Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy special issue (2022) and the author of Acting on Cultural Policy: Arts Practitioners, Policy-making and Civil Society (Palgrave, 2022).