WOMAN TO WATCH: the world is her stage

Lucy Prebble, playwright

‘Prebble’s fantastic firecracker of a play, ENRON, already looks like the play all the others will have to beat at this year’s theatre awards,’ raved The Telegraph. ‘The pulse and vigour of the play and production stem from their ability to make complex financial ideas manifest,’ said the Guardian. Just two of the rave reviews for 28-year-old Lucy Prebble’s latest work. But she won’t have seen them. ‘I can’t bear reading about myself,’ she says. ‘Even the nice stuff.’

It’s an unlikely nervousness for someone whose previous work has been of the headline-grabbing variety: Prebble also wrote Secret Diary Of A Call Girl, starring Billie Piper, for ITV2. ‘I’d been reading the blog [by the anonymous Belle de Jour] and thought there’d never been anything that had quite such an aggressive and sexual female voice,’ says Prebble. ‘It raised a lot of tough, but quite fun female sexual issues.’

Risk-taking is part of Prebble’s nature. As a 23-year-old assistant at the National Theatre (‘lots of making phone calls’), she had one of her plays put on at the Royal Court. ‘I thought, this feels like a time when some people might be interested in working with me,’ says Prebble, who left her job to pursue writing full-time. ‘It was a risk, but I thought, if it all goes tits up, I’ll try something else.’

What the judges said:
Karren Brady: ‘To be a success in the creative industry at so young an age is a tremendous achievement.’

Sam Baker: ‘Confidence, talent and a capacity to seize the moment are all essential – ENRON and Call Girl prove Lucy has these in spades.’