Caroline Bird is a playwright and poet. Caroline began writing plays as a teenager when she was the youngest ever member of the Royal Court Young Writer’s Programme, tutored by Simon Stephens. She has been shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and as Most Promising New Playwright at the Off-West-End Awards. In Spring 2022, her play Red Ellen about the life and work of Ellen Wilkinson, was produced by Northern Stage, Nottingham Playhouse and Royal Lyceum Theatre and received four-star reviews in The Guardian, The Times, Whatsonstage and The Stage. Red Ellen was shortlisted for the 2021 George Devine Award, recognising new writing and powerful voices.

Caroline’s new version of The Trojan Women premiered at the Gate Theatre at the end of 2012 to wide critical acclaim. Caroline’s play Chamber Piece featured as Show 3 in the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith’s Secret Theatre season, premiering in October 2013, before touring the country. Her Beano-inspired musical, The Trial of Dennis the Menace, was performed in the Purcell Room at the Southbank Centre. Other plays: Chamber Piece (Lyric Theatre Hammersmith) and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Northern Stage). 

She has had eight volumes of poetry published by Carcanet: Looking Through Letterboxes (2002); Trouble Came to the Turnip (2006); Watering Can (2009); The Hat-Stand Union (2013); In These Days of Prohibition (2017), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award, The Air Year (2020), which won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2020 and was shortlisted for the Costa Prize and the Polari Prize, her Selected Poems ‘Rookie,’ (2022,) and ‘Ambush at Still Lake’ (2024.) She won a Cholmondeley Award in 2023, for sustained excellence across a body of work. She was named one of the five official poets at the London Olympics 2012.