Elizabeth Kuti

Elizabeth Kuti was born in Cheshire, the child of a Hungarian father and an English mother. She earned a Ph.D. from Trinity College, Dublin, on the topic of eighteenth-century women playwrights. She has since worked as an actress, playwright and currently lectures in drama at the University of Essex. Kuti's first play, the completion of Frances Sheridan's eighteenth-century comedy A Trip to Bath, was produced by the Rough Magic Theatre Company as The Whisperers in 1999. Her original drama, Treehouses, premiered at the Peacock in Dublin in 2000. In 2005, Rough Magic produced The Sugar Wife, for which she won a joint first prize in the Susan Smith Blackburn Award for best play by a woman playwright in the English-speaking world. Kuti has also written Funerals in My Brain, Teen Lurve - a comedy-drama series for BBC Radio 5 - and The Lais of Marie de France, produced at the Dublin Fringe Festival in 1995.