Owen McCafferty

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Owen McCafferty (born 1961) is a playwright from Northern Ireland. After several jobs including tiling, and working in an abattoir, he became a full-time writer. McCafferty received the top three awards for this brilliant portrait of Belfast: the John Whiting Award for new theatre writing, Evening Standard Charles Wintour Award for new playwriting and the Meyer-Whitworth award for best new play. This is the first time that any playwright has won all three awards in one year. The play has been performed in the USA and Republic of Macedonia.^[1]

McCafferty has also adapted J P Miller's Days of Wine and Roses but only used the skeleton of the original.

All of McCafferty's plays show a truly original grasp of language and the complexities, both comic and tragic, of Belfast life. The first playwright to really create an authentic poetry out of the Belfast dialect to rival that of O'Casey and Synge. Like Synge, McCafferty's dialogue is highly stylized and his vocabulary burst with strange compounds and coined words yet the sense of what is being said is never lost. It is his lyricism which carries the audience with him and which makes witnessing a performance of one of his plays so haunting.