The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, known for discovering the work of female playwrights (and now trans and nonbinary), has announced it has awarded this year's prize to Sarah Mantell, a non-binary U.S. playwright.

The first out, nonbinary author to receive this award, Mantell won for their play In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot. In addition to the award, Mantell will receive $25,000 to support them in their playwriting efforts, as well as a signed original print created especially for the Prize by noted artist Willem de Kooning.

The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize is the largest and oldest international prize of its type. It has a strong connection to Houston both in the number of plays Houston theaters produce from its finalists and winners and because well known director and dramaturg Leslie Swackhamer of Houston, serves as the executive director of the prize-awarding group.

"[It was] founded in 1978 when very few women playwrights were being produced on stage," Swackhamer said. "We often discover a playwright before others do it.

"Eleven Susan Smith Blackburn finalists have subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama," Swackhamer said.

The prize was begun by Emilie "Mimi" Kilgore, sister of Susan Smith Blackburn, and Susan's husband, William "Bill" Blackburn. Mimi dies in Houston in 2022. "Mimi laid all the groundwork. Every five years she would do something special in Houston and involve all the theaters," Swackhamer said.

The application process is a rigorous one, Swackhamer said. Each play gets two or three readings before it gets to the finalist stage. The judges panel is made up award winners working in theater, film and television.

More than 200 plays from English- speaking countries were entered this year. The nine finalists include Anupama Chandrasekhar (India) The Father and the Assassin, Maryam Hamidi (UK) Moonset, Karen Hartman (US) New Golden Age, Katie Holly (Ireland) Her Hand on the Trellis
Kimber Lee (US) saturday, a.k. payne (US) Amani, Francisca Da Silveira (US) Pay No Worship, Zadie Smith (UK) The Wife of Willesden and  Ruby Thomas (UK) Linck & Mülhahn. Each finalist receives $5,000.

In a press release Mantell described their play as “a play about queer aging, capitalism, campfires and falling in love as the world ends”. Set on the precipice of the end of a world wracked by climate change, the play tells the story of a group of itinerant friends traveling together between warehouses, working night shifts and checking the address labels of the packages searching for people they’ve lost. The cast of seven consists of women, trans and nonbinary actors, all over 50."

According to the press release, judges "praised Mantell’s play for its creation of a compelling dystopian and highly theatricalized world inhabited by complex and vivid characters who rarely have stage time. The political critique and highly personal elements of the play deftly intertwine to ignite and propel the action
and the imagination."

Past winners and finalists of the competition include Lynn Nottage (Sweat, Ruined and Mud, River Stone), Wendy Wasserstein (The Heidi Chronicles), Erika Dickerson-Despenza (cullud wattah), Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive). "It's a go to source for the industry. There's also something really powerful about this prize for all the finalists, not just the winner," Swackhamer said.