Kaite O’Reilly is a multi-award-winning poet, playwright and dramaturg, who writes for radio, screen and live performance. She is internationally known as a disability artist and activist. She has recently been made a Fellow of the Royal Literature Society and a Hawthornden Fellow.
She has won the Peggy Ramsay Award, Manchester Theatre Award, Theatre-Wales Award and the Ted Hughes Award for new works in Poetry for Persians (National Theatre Wales). She is a two-time finalist in the International James Tait Black Prize for Innovation in Drama (2012, 2019) and The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. She was honored in the 2017/18 International Eliot Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy.
O'Reilly’s plays Atypical Plays for Atypical Actors and The ‘d’ Monologues are published by Oberon/Methuen/Bloomsbury. Her first feature film, The Almond and the Seahorse with Mad as Birds films, was released in late 2022, featuring Rebel Wilson and Charlotte Gainsbourg. The film won the Special Jury's Prize at Dinard Festival (a 'Hitchcock').
At MacDowell, O'Reilly researched Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and her Children for a new stage adaptation and completed “Invisible”, a first draft of a pilot TV screenplay with a disabled protagonist.
