Entries to the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting 2025 are now closed. After 6pm Thursday 9th January you are no longer able to update your submission.  

It takes a huge amount of dedication, emotion, thought, imagination and energy to complete a script, and then immense bravery to send it out into the world for strangers to experience. Whatever happens next, it is important to recognise that as an extraordinary achievement. Thank you for your courage.  

We are incredibly grateful to have been trusted to read your work, and will treat each script with the utmost value, respect and rigour across our anonymous reading process. This work is no small feat, and we are thrilled to be working with hundreds of freelance readers who will bring their thorough care and expertise to your plays. 

We know it can feel like a long wait before further news – please bear with us – it is vitally important that each script is given the dedicated time and attention it deserves.  

To ensure swift and clear communication with all entrants we will make Prize announcements here on this website. Having entered the Prize, you will now be automatically signed up to our newsletter and will receive an email (to the email address attached to your submission) that notifies you when the longlist has been shared. 

The Top 100 Longlist scripts will be announced here on Thursday 17th April 2025. The longlist is announced publicly on this website due to the anonymous nature of reading requiring all scripts and writers to remain under a pseudonym. The longlisted scripts will receive a full, newly written script report direct to the email attached to their submission by the end of September this year.  Unfortunately, we are unable to give feedback on scripts which did not make it into the Top 100.

Writers of shortlisted scripts will be contacted directly via the telephone on Friday 16th May. 

Our 20th Anniversary Ceremony of the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting 2025 will take place at the Royal Exchange Theatre on Monday 21st July.