Playwrights’ Studio Scotland’s New Playwrights Awards provide an important professional development opportunity for five early career playwrights living in Scotland who have a genuine commitment to writing for the theatre. Those receiving awards come to Cove Park for research and writing residencies of one week each.

Maryam is a multi-disciplinary writer, theatre maker and actor. She co-wrote the Amnesty Award nominated The Chronicles of Irania with A Moment’s Peace Theatre Company. Her play The Builders was developed for the Tron’s Border Control event and was more recently read at The View From Here at Theatre 503. She has also been developing Archaeology, a simulated archaeological dig and audio piece unearthing the otherness of the migrant experience in the UK with support from the Tron Lab programme.

She was mentored by Jo Clifford through the Playwrights’ Studio Scotland Mentoring Programme, through which she developed Poppies, a magic realist exploration of child marriage against the backdrop of the Afghani Opium trade. Early work includes Fat yellow-bellies, a play about magic and myth intersecting with women’s militia camps on the Iran/Iraq border and Crow, a new mythology based on The Life and Times of Crow by Ted Hughes.