This second collection of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s plays contains her work from 1995 to 2001. Diameira is published here for the first time.

Playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker grew up in the Basque country. She was Resident Writer for ‘Shared Experience’ (1983) and the Royal Court Theatre (1984-5).

Her plays include New Anatomies, first staged at the ICA in London; Abel’s Sister, first performed at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1984; and The Grace of Mary Traverse (1985), winner of the Plays and Players Most Promising Playwright Award. She is best known for her play Our Country’s Good (1988), based on the novel The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally. First performed at the Royal Court in 1988, it was awarded the Laurence Olivier/BBC Award for Best New Play and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best New Foreign Play and was nominated for six ‘Tonies’.

The Love of the Nightingale (1989) was first performed in 1988 at The Other Place, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford, and won the Eileen Anderson Central Television Drama Award. Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1992), a satirical portrait of the art world, was first performed at the Royal Court in 1991 and won the London Critics’ Circle Best West End Play Award, the Writer’s Guild Award (Best West End Play) and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. The Break of Day (1995) was first performed at the Royal Court in 1995 by Out of Joint theatre company, directed by Max Stafford-Clark, and toured as a companion piece to Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. After Darwin (1998) was first performed at the Hampstead Theatre, London, in 1988.

She has adapted and translated work by Marivaux, Anouilh, Maeterlinck, Pirandello, Sophocles, Euripides and Preissova. She also wrote the screenplays for film adaptations of Edith Wharton’s The Children and Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove. She is the author of a television play, Do Not Disturb, and her work for radio includes Dianeira, broadcast by BBC Radio 3 in November 1999, an adaptation and translation of Euripides’ play Hecuba broadcast by BBC Radio 3 in 2001, and adaptation of a Kadare novel The H File and Scenes of Seduction on Radio 4 in March 2005.

Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play, Galileo’s Daughter, was performed in Bath in 2004 by the Peter Hall Company. Her most recent play is Divine Intervention (2006).