Anna Coatman

Her career began with a school drama project: words scrawled in green biro across the pages of an exercise book. In 1980, Andrea Dunbar, a pregnant teenager living in a refuge for ‘battered women’, entered a play she had written when she was 15 into a national writing competition organised by the Royal Court. Max Stafford-Clark, who had just joined the theatre as artistic director, asked her to send more, and together they put The Arbor on stage. The play was named after the street on which Dunbar grew up, on a rundown council estate in Bradford.