Tom Stoppard

Award-winning playwright

Tom Stoppard was born in Czechslovakia and grew up in India and Singapore, before moving to Britain with his family after World War Two. He began his career working as a journalist for the Western Daily Press and the Bristol Evening World in the 1950s, before joining London's Scene magazine as a theatre critic. He began writing plays for radio and television in the early 1960s, including Albert Bridge, which was first broadcast by the BBC in 1997. A 1964 grant from the Ford Foundation enabled him to spend time in Berlin, where he wrote the one-act play that would eventually become Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It would be awarded an Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Theatre. Stoppard's play 1974 play Travesties was staged by the RSC, and earned Stoppard another "Tony" in 1975 when it transferred to Broadway, New York.

It was in the mid-70s that Stoppard became concerned with human rights issues, especially in Eastern Europe. His 1976 play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour was directly inspired by the imprisonment of his friend Victor Fainberg under the Soviet regime. Two years later came Professional Foul, a play written for Amnesty International's Prisoner of Conscience Year in 1977. More recently, his 2006 play Rock 'n' Roll followed the story of the Czech rock band The Plastic People of the Universe, who were also incarcerated by Soviet authorities in the late 1960s. Since the 1970s, Stoppard has written a number of other plays, including On the Razzle (1982), and The Coast of Utopia (2002), a trilogy of plays set in 19th century Russia.