Carys D. Coburn
Duration
Carys D. Coburn is a trans writer from Dublin. Their work is political, playful, funny, angry, strange. They were the winner of the Verity Bargate Award 2017 for Citysong — co-produced by Soho Theatre, the Abbey Theatre, and Galway International Arts Festival. Other plays include Absent The Wrong (Best Production at Dublin Fringe 2022) and HOTHOUSE (Best Production at Dublin Fringe 2023). One of the founders of MALAPROP, their work together won acclaim for its distinctive blend of nerdiness and tenderness. Other work with MALAPROP includes Where Sat The Lovers, Before You Say Anything, and Everything Not Saved.
Short work includes Me, Sara for the Abbey’s Priming the Canon, ALASIALIAS for Paines Plough’s Come To Where I’m From, and Our Mother, My Daughters for Draíocht Blanchardstown’s HOME Theatre. Work with young people is a major strand of their practice; they are the author of Ask Too Much of Me for the NYT ensemble (Peacock Theatre 2019); this is a room…, for Dublin Youth Theatre (Dublin TheatreFestival 2017); they are currently under commission to write HandToMouthToMouthToHand for the National Theatre’s Connections programme. Between 2020 and 2023 they ran ARTICULATE for Youth Theatre Ireland, a long-term support programme for a cohort of young writers. This culminated in the production of Like We Were Born To Move, by Eimear Hussey, an ARTICULATE participant, as the 2023 NYT ensemble play.
They are the librettist, with Annemarie NíChuirreáin, of Michael Gallen’s opera Elsewhere, which premiered on the Abbey Stage in 2021, and the sole librettist of Horse Ape Bird, an INO and Music Generation co-commission, by David Coonan. They contributed text to THISISPOPBABY’s WAKE. They were the facilitator of the inaugural WEFT Studio Group, a peer mentorship and support network for Black artists and artists of colour more broadly.
Carys D. Coburn was formerly known as Dylan Coburn Gray.