Taking the Stage 2024 - Closing Speech

Suzette Coon - Playwright & Director

Suzette Coon is a playwright and theatre maker living and working in London. Her plays have shown at theatres including Southwark Playhouse, Arcola Theatre, Theatre 503, amongst others. Suzette has been long-listed and short-listed numerous times for BBC Writersroom and has been selected for the Criterion Writing Programme and the Sphinx Theatre’s Sphinx30 Lab, a development programme which supports female British playwrights with mentoring and a seed commission to create new work for the main stage. For Sphinx she developed ‘A Jewish Love Story’ about three generations of Jewish women in England and it was supported by Watford Palace Theatre and Arts Council England. Most recently her play The History of Animals received development at Omnibus Theatre and her new play Killer Whale was commissioned by A Million Fred Productions for a UK tour. Suzette’s theatre company Little Pieces of Gold was established in 2010, dedicated to championing and producing new writing. Little Pieces of Gold has staged over 400 new short plays, facilitated longterm creative collaborations for writers and directors, and facilitated literary agent representation for playwrights. It has a strong track record of showcasing the work of under-represented writers, with over a thousand writers submitting their work each year through an open submission process. In 2020 ‘Short Plays with Great Plays for Women’, an anthology of 22 short plays by women, with a foreword by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, was published by Routledge Books in 2020 both in the UK and abroad.

Suzette tutors in playwriting. She has tutored and mentored at various colleges, has been a mentor on the Royal Central School of Drama’s MA/MFA Writing for Stage & Broadcast Media, and runs affordable playwriting workshops for aspiring writers.