A brothel and bar in a Congolese mining town, run by a woman who shelters and exploits the survivors of militia violence (2008)
Ruined — the 2009 Pulitzer; the proprietor is Mama Nadi. Modelled in part on Brecht's Mother Courage.
Literature · Playwrights
Lynn Nottage
born 1964 · American
Contemporary American drama; documentary-based realism
Lynn Nottage is the only woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, for Ruined in 2009 and Sweat in 2017. A Brooklyn-born former press officer for Amnesty International, she builds plays out of long interview research — with Congolese war survivors, with laid-off Pennsylvania steelworkers — and writes about labour, race, gender and economic collapse with unusual warmth and comedy.
How to spot them
- ▸Two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama — the only woman to have won twice
- ▸Plays built on years of documentary interviewing before a word is written
- ▸Work, wages and the dignity of labour: factories, kitchens, sewing rooms
- ▸Four years at Amnesty International before writing full time
- ▸Wrote the book for a Broadway jukebox musical about a pop superstar
Key works
Friends who have worked the same factory floor in Reading, Pennsylvania, for decades are split apart by a lockout and a picket line (2015)
Sweat — the 2017 Pulitzer, developed from two years of interviews in the city.
A crew of formerly incarcerated cooks at a truck-stop sandwich shop dream up perfect sandwiches under a tyrannical boss (2021)
Clyde's.
A lonely Black seamstress in 1905 New York sews corsets for a socialite and a brothel madam, and is courted by letter from the Panama Canal (2003)
Intimate Apparel — later made into an opera with the composer Ricky Ian Gordon.
A 1930s Black film actress remembered only for playing a maid, and a modern academic panel arguing about what became of her (2011)
By the Way, Meet Vera Stark.
A Brooklyn socialite crashes back down to the housing project she came from when her husband absconds with the money (2004)
Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine.
A Broadway jukebox musical set around rehearsals for a 1992 world tour, for which she wrote the book (2022)
MJ the Musical.
Key ideas
- Deindustrialisation and what it does to solidarity between black and white workers
- Sexual violence as a weapon of war, documented rather than sensationalised
- Recovering the Black women written out of American history and film
- Comedy and appetite as survival strategies in desperate places
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Brooklyn, New York, on 2 November 1964
- •Educated at Brown University and the Yale School of Drama
- •Spent four years as a press officer for Amnesty International USA before writing full time
- •Ruined grew out of interviews with Congolese women refugees conducted in Uganda
- •Sweat was developed from interviews in Reading, Pennsylvania, then among the poorest cities of its size in America
- •Awarded a MacArthur 'genius' Fellowship in 2007
- •The only woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice — in 2009 and 2017
- •Professor of playwriting at Columbia University School of the Arts
- •In March 2026 she premiered a musical adaptation of Fannie Hurst's Imitation of Life at The Shed in New York
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