Claudine Toutoungi

Claudine Toutoungi is an award-winning playwright and poet. Her first collection Smoothie (Carcanet, 2017) received warm reviews and was followed by Two Tongues (Carcanet, 2020), a surreal exploration of the dislocations of modern life, that won the Ledbury Munthe Poetry prize in 2021 and an Authors’ Foundation grant. Her poetry has appeared widely in the UK and abroad and her live poetry contributions to festivals include Tongue Fu, PoetryEast and appearances on BBC Radio 4.

Claudine’s plays Bit Part and Slipping ran at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in 2014, following Slipping’s selection for New York’s Lark Play Centre’s international HotINK series. A bittersweet drama about a relationship sparked in an ocular prosthetics clinic, Claudine’s adaptation of Slipping for Radio 4 was a 2015 BBC Audio Drama awards finalist in three categories. Her dramas for BBC Radio 4 include Deliverers, Home Front, The Inheritors and multiple dramatisations of work by writers such as Delphine de Vigan and Mira Hamermesh.

A Lamda-trained actor and secondary teacher with several years’ experience in schools, Claudine has also taught creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and Cambridge University. A former BBC radio drama producer, she has directed many dramas for broadcast, including Anita Sullivan’s Exiled From Paradise, (Best Drama CRE Race in the Media awards, 2006).

A recipient of Extant theatre company’s Tim Gebbels bursary award, Claudine is working on a new play Seesaw, a quirky navigation of sight loss, and an original drama for BBC Radio 4, The Voice in my Ear.