Lucy Prebble is a British playwright. She is the author of the plays The Sugar Syndrome, The Effect and ENRON, and adaptation writer of the television series Secret Diary of a Call Girl.
Biography
Prebble grew up in Haslemere, Surrey, and was educated at Guildford High School. While studying English at the University of Sheffield, Prebble wrote a short play called Liquid, which won the PMA Most Promising Playwright Award. She received the Distinguished Alumni Award in 2014. Prebble subsequently won the George Devine Award for her debut play The Sugar Syndrome in May 2004, followed by the TMA Award for Best New Play in October 2004. 2007 saw the premiere of Prebble's first television series, Secret Diary of a Call Girl, starring Billie Piper. Prebble wrote for the first two of the show's four seasons, the last of which concluded in March 2011. Prebble and Piper have collaborated on a further television project, I Hate Suzie, which is due to air in 2020. Her next theatre project was ENRON, based on the financial scandal and collapse of the American energy corporation of the same name. It was produced by theatre company Headlong at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 2009, under the direction of Rupert Goold. The production transferred first to the Royal Court and subsequently to the Noël Coward Theatre. The play earned Prebble an Olivier Award nomination for Best New Play. The production's Broadway transfer opened at the Broadhurst Theatre in April 2010 but failed to match the critical acclaim it received in the UK and closed the following month. The Effect, which premiered at the National Theatre in 2012, won the 2012 Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. The Effect premiered in the US Off-Broadway at the Barrow Street Theatre on 2 March 2016, directed by David Cromer, and featuring Kati Brazda, Susannah Flood, Carter Hudson and Steve Key. In 2019, it was listed in The Independent as one of the 40 best plays of all time. In June 2018 Prebble was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative. The same month saw the premiere of Succession, the HBO series about a global media family for which Prebble serves as both co-executive producer and writer. In October 2018, London's Old Vic announced Prebble's A Very Expensive Poison, a stage adaptation of Luke Harding's non-fiction book of the same name. The play is about the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko by means of the invisible radioactive isotope polonium-210. The play opened at the Old Vic on 5 September 2019, directed by John Crowley. Prebble won the 2020 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for A Very Expensive Poison.
