Ed Harris

Ed is an award-winning, dyslexic playwright, poet and comedy writer based in Brighton. Before finding his feet as a writer, Ed was a binman, care worker, TEFL teacher, and even spent one winter as a husky trainer in Lapland. Ed’s first major play Mongrel Island opened at Soho Theatre in 2011 to great critical acclaim, and was later produced in Mexico as Perro Sin Raza where it ran for six months. His other plays include The Cow Play, What the Thunder Said (which won the Writers’ Guild award for Best Children’s Play 2017), and Never Ever After (shortlisted for the Meyer-Whitworth award). He wrote his first opera, A Shoe Full of Stars, with composer Omar Shahryar. It was described as a ‘comic opera for children… about terrorism!’ and won the international YAMaward in 2018 for Best Opera.

Ed has also become one of BBC Radio Drama’s most regularly commissioned and highly acclaimed dramatists since his first radio play Porshia was produced in 2007. His first sitcom, Dot, a popular wartime spoof about the misadventures of some of the female staff of Churchill’s War Rooms, has run since 2015. Between 2011 and 2015 he won a Sony Gold/Radio Academy award for The Resistance of Mrs Brown, a Writers’ Guild award for Troll, and a BBC Audio Drama award for Billions.