Ed Harris

Ed Harris is an award-winning playwright, poet and comedy writer.

His first major play Mongrel Island opened at Soho Theatre in 2011 to great critical acclaim, and was later produced in Mexico as Perro Sin Raza. His other plays include The Cow Play, Never Ever After (shortlisted for the Meyer-Whitworth award) and What the Thunder Said (which won The Writers’ Guild Award for Best Play for Young Audiences). His first opera A Shoe Full of Stars won the international YAM Award for Best Opera. Last year, Ed’s play for The National Theatre, Strangers Like Me had over fifty productions in the UK and was produced at the Dorfmann Theatre, for The NT’s Connections programme.

Ed has become one of BBC Radio Drama’s most regularly commissioned and highly acclaimed dramatists since his first radio play Porshia was produced in 2007. As well as being shortlisted for the Tinniswood and Prix Europa Awards, between 2011 and 2015 he won Sony Gold/Radio Academy Award for The Resistance of Mrs Brown, a Writers’ Guild Award for Troll, and a BBC Audio Drama Award for Billions. His first sitcom, Dot ran from 2015-2021. 

Ed Harris is the lead writer for BBC Radio 4’s Kafkaesque Season, with adaptations of The Trial and The Man Who Disappeared, and a new play Franz and Felice, which won the PRIX EUROPA for Best European Audio Fiction of the Year 2024. In 2024 he contributed to the BBC's Opening Lines series together with Professor Carolin Duttlinger, in episodes on The Man Who Disappeared and The Trial. He is a Royal Literary Fellow and the Writer in Residence for Kafka’s Transformative Communities’ Project at Wadham College, University of Oxford.