Fin Kennedy - Biography

Award-winning investigative playwright and playwrighting teacher

Fin is a graduate of the MA Writing for Performance programme at Goldsmiths College, London.

His first play Protection was produced at Soho Theatre in 2003, where he was also Pearson writer-in-residence.

His second play How To Disappear Completely & Never Be Found won the 38th Arts Council John Whiting Playwrighting Award, the first time in 40 years that an unproduced play has won. It was subsequently commissioned by Sam West for Sheffield Crucible and produced in March-April 2007 to critical acclaim.

Fin's first play for teenagers, Locked In, a hip-hop musical about pirate radio, was produced by Half Moon Young People’s Theatre in 2006 and toured nationally. His second play for Half Moon, We Are Shadows, was subsequently commissioned and toured during autumn 2007.

Along with Matt Peover and Mark Bell of Liquid Theatre, Fin was recently the recipient of a £20,000 Arts Council grant to develop a modern Jacobean revenge tragedy for the 20th Century. A reading of this ambitious new play will take place in early 2008.

As well as writing plays Fin also has many years of experience teaching playwrighting at secondary, FE, undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

He works for schools, youth clubs and theatre education teams across inner city London, and is also a visiting lecturer at Goldsmiths College, Brunel University and Boston University.

During 2007 he was writer-in-residence at Mulberry School in Tower Hamlets, where he developed Mehndi Night, a new play for their students to take to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Such was the success of this project that an in-school theatre company, Mulberry Theatre Company, was formed. Plans are afoot to develop MTC with its director Jools Voce, into a Bengali women's theatre company in the heart of Tower Hamlets.

See CV for full details.

'This is as good as theatre gets.'
The Stage on How To Disappear

'Real excitement lies in discovering a young writer who is more concerned with major political issues than minor domestic upsets.'
The Guardian on Protection

How did I get here? How Not To Disappear - A professional autobiography By Fin Kennedy Click here to read full article