Dr Nicholas Pierpan

Nicholas Pierpan gained a BA from Bowdoin College in the US (Double major in Economics and English, Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa), and then an MPhil and DPhil in English from the University of Oxford. He is a playwright, screenwriter, and poet, and began teaching Creative Writing at Royal Holloway in 2014.

Nicholas’ primary interests are theatre, film, television, and poetry. He recently combined interests in theatre and the poetry of William Wordsworth by writing a play about the poet’s life, produced in 2017 by English Touring Theatre and the Theatre by the Lake in Keswick, Cumbria. Nicholas won the 2013 Off West End Award for Most Promising New Playwright and was nominated for an Evening Standard Award for his play You Can Still Make a Killing. He has also won the Cameron Mackintosh Award for New Writing twice, a Peggy Ramsay Award, and was shortlisted for the Yale Drama Prize. He has been on attachment with the National Theatre Studio, and was the Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. In television, Nicholas was selected for the BBC Drama Production Writers’ Scheme. In film he won the Script Factory Serious Screenwriting Award and was commissioned by the BBC to write a film for its iPlayer Shorts strand. After a BBC Sparks Radio Residency, Nicholas’ radio plays have been broadcast on BBC3, BBC4 and BBC6. In 2017 he was named to the BBC's New Talent Hotlist, created by BBC Director-General Tony Hall and actor Idris Elba. Nicholas was shortlisted for the 2019 Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer's Award, and selected for the 2020/21 Serial Eyes programme at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin.