The Gift

Robert Holman was born in 1952. He was awarded an Arts Council Writers' Bursary in 1974, and since then has spent periods as resident dramatist with the National Theatre and with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon- Avon. His plays include The Natural Cause (Cockpit Theatre, 1974); Mud (Royal Court Theatre, 1974); Outside the Whale (Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 1976); German Skerries (Bush Theatre, 1977, for which he won the George Devine Award); Other Worlds (Royal Court Theatre, 1983); Today (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1984); The Overgrown Path (Royal Court Theatre, 1985); Making Noise Quietly (Bush Theatre, 1986); Across Oka (Royal Shakespeare, 1988); Rafts and Dreams (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 1990); Bad Weather (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1998); Holes in the Skin (Chichester Festival Theatre, 2003); and Jonah and Otto (Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, 2008). He has also written a novel, The Amish Landscape (1992). In 2010 he collaborated with David Eldridge and Simon Stephens on A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky, which premiered at the Lyric, Hammersmith.