Owen McCafferty

Who is Owen McCafferty?

Owen McCafferty is a playwright from Northern Ireland.

Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, McCafferty in 1961 he was brought up in London from the age of 1 until aged 10 when his parents returned to Belfast. He was educated at St Augustine's Secondary School, the College of Business Studies and then the University of Ulster where he studied Philosophy and History. He held several jobs, including civil servant, accounts clerk, tiler and working in an abattoir, before becoming a full-time writer.

He lives in Belfast with his wife, three children and granddaughter.

His play Scenes from the Big Picture, originally produced in 2003 at the National Theatre in London, earned him the John Whiting Award, the Evening Standard's Charles Wintour Award for New Playwriting and the Meyer-Whitworth Award. It was the first time any playwright had won all three awards in one year.

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

McCafferty's writing features the language and complexities, both comic and tragic, of Belfast life. 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.