Fraser Grace

When not co-directing the programme, Fraser Grace is a freelance writer, best-known as the playwright behind Breakfast with Mugabe which won the John Whiting Award for Best Play and was premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company (Dir Antony Sher). The play has since been produced widely in the UK and the USA (shortlisted for Best Play, Off-Broadway Awards). In 2025 it was revived at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg (Dir Calvin Ratladi). Another play for the RSC, Always Orange (Dir Donnacadh O’Briain)  - follows survivors of a terrorist attack on a major city – and helped to relaunch The Other Place, the RSC’s base for new writing. 

Other plays for the stage include the one-woman play Gifts of War (Menagerie Theatre, touring, Dir Paul Bourne); Perpetua (Birmingham REP, Verity Bargate Award, Best Play, Dir Jonathon Lloyd); Who Killed Mr Drum? (with Sylvester Stein, Riverside Studios, Dir Paul Robinson); Frobisher’s Gold (Menagerie Theatre, Dir Paul Bourne); The Lifesavers (Theatre 503 & Colchester Mercury Studio, Dir Paul Robinson); King David, Man of Blood (Colchester Mercury main stage, Dir Dee Evans);  and Kalashnikov in the Woods by the Lake (Pursued by a Bear, Oxford Playhouse & touring, Dir Helena Bell). All are published by Oberon Books. Fraser’s play, BLISS, based on a short story by the Russian writer Andrey Platonov, premiered in Voronezh, Russia, in June 2019, and opened at the Finborough Theatre in May 2022 (Menagerie Theatre, Dir Paul Bourne). That play is published by Methuen Drama. 

Fraser also writes audio drama. Bubble, dramatizing poems by the poet Andrea Porter, was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 (producer Anastasia Tolstoy-Miloslavsky); Breakfast with Mugabe (adapting the RSC production) was broadcast by Radio 3 and The World Service (producer Marilyn Imrie); Wrestling Angels – three stories for radio - was broadcast by Radio 4 (producer by Marilyn Imrie, featuring Noma Dumezweni, James Fleet and Deborah Findlay).

Before helping to establish the MSt in Writing for Performance, Fraser directed a Master’s course in Playwriting Studies at the University of Birmingham (2011-15). He is  is co-author with joint director of the MSt Clare Bayley of Playwriting: A Writers’ and Authors’ Companion published by Bloomsbury. 

In May 2025, Galileo Publications released Fraser’s new book of creative non-fiction, Firestarter, telling a true story about the hunt for arsonists who ‘terrorised’ Cambridgeshire in the early nineteenth century. 

He is now working on a screenplay, ‘Lucifers’  based on the book.