Shakespeare's Globe Launches 2026 Climate Playwriting Prize

Shakespeare's Globe, Climate Spring, and Fern Culture have announced the launch of the 2026 Climate Playwriting Prize. The Prize aims to embolden and champion playwrights engaging with the nature and climate crisis, to uncover the most exciting new and accessible work.

The Climate Playwriting Prize aims to empower the theatre industry into new climate conversations, drawing on the skills of storytellers and artists to inspire societal shifts towards a restorative relationship with nature. The winning playwright will receive £15,000 and dramaturgical support to develop the play, including rehearsal draft with specialists at Shakespeare's Globe, Climate Spring and Fern Culture, and industry exposure to leading theatre decision makers.

The Climate Playwriting Prize will engage with the breadth and diversity of environmental writing to encourage writers across the UK to move climate storytelling on-stage with a larger platform.

To enter, writers must submit unproduced full-length stage plays in the English language that address the climate and nature crisis. For this prize, ‘climate' is defined expansively: it includes environmental changes in the broadest sense, but also the social, political, and cultural response. The Climate Playwriting Prize is open to plays that connect with the widest possible audience and respond to living through this profound time in human history. Further terms and conditions will be available on the Climate Playwriting Prize website.

Submissions will open in June, and close on 1 September 2026. Winners will be announced in Autumn 2026.

The Climate Playwriting Prize is being delivered in association with partner organisations Chichester Festival Theatre, Exeter Northcott Theatre, Leeds Playhouse, Lyric Theatre Belfast, Mercury Theatre Colchester, New Earth Theatre, Pentabus Theatre, and tiata fahodzi. Each will host a climate storytelling workshop delivered by the Globe, Fern Culture, and freelance playwrights which will feed into the award's reading and judging process.

The judges for the Prize will be announced at a later date.

Michelle Terry, Artistic Director of Shakespeare's Globe, said: “Almost every play Shakespeare wrote was about human beings, our human nature, and our place in the natural world. Shakespeare knew that “one touch of nature made the whole world kin”. He helped build a Theatre made of 1,000 oak trees, open to the sun, the wind, and the rain, bobbing alongside the ebb and flow of the river Thames. He brought thousands of strangers together in this elemental imaginarium and he put his craft to work. We are so proud to be launching a prize that encourages, platforms, and celebrates those brave writers who are putting their craft to work today to make a better world tomorrow.

Now is the time to remind ourselves of our human-nature and remember the profound and positive contribution we can make on planet earth. There is no better way to do that than through the stories we tell. And there is no greater art form than Theatre to unite people and tell those stories together.”

Guy Jones, New Work Associate at Shakespeare's Globe, said “I am thrilled that the Globe is the launchpad for the Climate Playwriting Prize, and am hugely grateful to our partners at Fern and Climate Spring, and partner theatres across the country, for helping to make it happen: this mycelial network of organisations working together gives me enormous optimism for the future. I hope that it will attract plays from a huge diversity of writers, from those steeped in climate lore, to others who hadn't seen themselves as a climate playwright, until now. I can't wait to read the work that is submitted through the award process and maybe find a play that could change the world.”

Amber Massie-Blomfield, Director of Fern Culture, said “We exist in a time of profound significance for all human history, as we transform the ways we live to ensure a flourishing future for life on our planet. We cannot do it without the storytellers. Story, after all, is how we have always gathered, the way we process human experience, make sense of the events of our times, connect with our environment and start to imagine possibilities for the future. This Prize will empower and celebrate the extraordinary artists who write stories for Britain's stages, encouraging all of them - even if they've never engaged with climate before - to understand how the climate crisis is relevant to their writing. Our ambition is to flood our theatres with exhilarating, inspiring, and surprising plays about the climate, as diverse and inventive as the playwrights who create them.”

Josh Cockcroft, Director of Impact & Research at Climate Spring, said: “Theatre transforms us, it moves us beyond ourselves to create, for a moment, a community experiencing something wholly unique and metamorphic - moments of collective effervescence that we need now, more than ever, to bring us together. In this moment of rupture, culture has a vital role to play, and the Climate Playwriting Prize is a seed we are planting along with our work in film, TV and literature to cultivate a change in how we respond to the climate crisis. We want the Prize to enable playwrights to show just how expansive, surprising and inspiring climate storytelling can be, and we are delighted to be launching the prize in partnership with Shakespeare's Globe and Fern Culture, along with our partner theatres across the country”.