At a March 10 ceremony at Playwrights Horizons, a.k. payne was named the 2025 winner of The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, an annual honor recognizing women+ playwrights working in English-speaking theatre. The prize includes a $25,000 cash prize and a signed print by artist Willem de Kooning, created especially for the prize.
"I began Furlough鈥檚 Paradise with a curiosity about grief at the end of the world," payne tells 半岛体育 in a statement. "As we face a range of catastrophes on national and global scales, I find myself craving art that speaks to our desires for transformative communal mourning, connection, and healing. Without elders on the living plane to teach them how it was once done, I wondered about how two individuals might craft/remember a grief ritual to memorialize the seemingly endless instances of Black death that surround them. How might two survive and witness one another鈥攖heir joys, humor, totality鈥攚hich inherently transforms worlds?
"I lift up spirit and my people who are storytellers, who wrote without once putting down a pen, with letters lost to fire and sea and between lines of a strange colonial language. I love y鈥檃ll deep and always."
The work, which premiered at Atlanta's Alliance Theatre last year, follows two cousins raised like sisters who return to their hometown for the funeral of their mother and aunt. As the two make sense of their grief, home, love, and kinship, the play explores the experience of being a Black woman in today's America. The play previously won the Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition and the National Theatre Conference's Stavis Playwriting Award. A West Coast premiere is planned for Geffen Playhouse in April.
鈥淭his play is poetic and funny, but it鈥檚 also charting what it means to try to find a utopia in a world that has a criminal justice system that is far from perfect," said Geffen Artistic Director Tarell Alvin McCraney in a season announcement statement last year. "Payne was one of my students, and probably one of the most powerful writers I鈥檝e encountered in my time as a professor.鈥�
Payne's body of work also includes AMANI, BURNBABYBURN: an american dream, love i awethu further, blooms, Dwellers, and Projects in Flight.
Two special commendations of $10,000 each were also awarded at this year's ceremony, to Haruna Lee for 49 Days and Else Went for An Oxford Man. Additional finalists, each of whom will receive $5,000 prizes, were Chris Bush for Otherland, Carys Coburn for 叠脕狈, Keiko Green for You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World, Isobel McArthur for The Fair Maid of the West, Suzie Miller for Inter Alia, and Anna Ziegler for The Janeiad.
This year's judges panel comprised Linda Cho, Jennifer Ehle, Nancy Medina, Mark Ravenhill, George Strus, and Indira Varma.
Now in its 47th year, the Blackburn Prize is the largest and oldest international playwriting award. More than 500 plays have been honored as finalists since the honor's inception in 1978, with past winners including Annie Baker, Alice Birch, Benedict Lombe, Julia Cho, Caryl Churchill, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Katori Hall, Lucy Kirkwood, Marsha Norman, Lynn Nottage, Dael Orlandersmith, Lucy Prebble, Sarah Ruhl, Paula Vogel, Wendy Wasserstein, Timberlake Wertenbaker, and Cheryl West.
For more on this year's finalists and their works, visit .
