Bloomsbury Publishing has announced it will launch this year’s Lit in Colour Play List at its annual Bloomsbury Festival at London’s Conway Hall. The free launch event (23 October) will feature talks and discussions with teachers, theatre makers and exam boards alongside live theatre performances of plays by writers from Black, Asian, Jewish and other Minority Ethnic groups.
launched by Penguin Books and the UK’s leading race equality think-tank The Runnymede Trust, the Lit in Colour campaign is a long-term social impact programme to support UK schools in making the teaching and learning of English Literature and Drama more inclusive of authors of colour.
The Lit in Colour Play Lists are free downloadable lists highlighting plays by Global Majority and minority ethnic writers. A new list is published each year, and all plays featured explore themes and topics which reflect the issues that affect students today and fit with English and Drama teaching at secondary school level.
Bloomsbury Publishing’s partnership in the Lit in Colour initiative stems from a discussion at a 2021 teacher webinar and supported the launch of the inaugural Play List in 2023. While Bloomsbury is the UK’s largest performing arts publisher, the 57 plays in the 2023 Play List are selected from a range of publishers, offering teachers a ‘publisher-agnostic’ list of plays to discover.
Book tickets here: