Marina Carr

Marina Carr was born in 1964, in Dublin, Ireland, but spent the majority of her childhood in Pallas Lake, County Offaly. Carr grew up in a house filled with, writing, painting, and music. Her father, Hugh Carr, was a playwright and studied music under Frederick May. Her mother was the principal of the local school and wrote poetry in Irish, "there was a lot of literary rivalry". As a child, Marina and her siblings built a theatre in their shed, "we lay boards across the stacked turf, hung an old blue sheet for a curtain and tied a bicycle lamp to a rafter",. Carr recalls, "it was serious stuff, we even had a shop and invited all the local kids in; the plays were very violent!"

Carr attended University College Dublin, studying English and philosophy. She graduated in 1987, and subsequently received an honorary degree of Doctorate of Literature from her alma mater. She has held posts as writer-in-residence at the Abbey Theatre, and she has taught at Trinity College Dublin, Princeton University, and Villanova University. She currently lectures in the English department at Dublin City University. Marina Carr is considered one of Ireland’s most prominent playwrights and is a member of Aosdána. Her works have been translated into many languages, and have received much critical acclaim. Carr's work has received numerous awards; The Mai won the Dublin Theatre Festival Best New Irish Play award (1994-1995), and Portia Coughlan won the nineteenth Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (1996-1997). Other awards include The Irish Times Playwright award 1998, The EM Foster Prize form the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American/Ireland Fund Award, The Macaulay Fellowship and The Hennessy Award. Carr has been named a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, administered by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. The award, which includes a financial prize of $165,000 (or €155,000), will be formally presented in September 2017. She is the second Irish author to receive the prize, following playwright Abbie Spallen in 2016.

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