Wajdi Mouawad

Author, actor, and director Wajdi Mouawad was born in Lebanon in 1968 and spent his childhood in France. At the age of eight, he emigrated to Canada after France refused his parents the right to stay. There he completed his acting studies and founded his first theater group. In 2000, he became artistic director of the Théâtre de Quat’sous in Montreal. In 2005, he founded a Canadian and a French theater group with whom he developed and directed his own plays. Mouawad already had an extensive dramatic work in 2006, when the first of his plays was shown in German: Incendies took over the main stages in German-language theater with 23 productions in two years. From 2007 to 2012, Mouawad was artistic director of the French theater in Ottawa. In 2009, he worked as an "Artiste Invité" for the Festival d'Avignon, and has occupied the same role for the Grand T Nantes since 2011. Since 2016, he has been director of the Théâtre national de la Colline in Paris, where he premiered Tous des oiseaux in 2017. Wajdi Mouawad has received numerous awards, including 2009 Officier de l'Ordre du Canada and the Grand Prix du Théâtre of the Académie Francaise. In 2017, he was invited as a literary speaker at the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair.
His plays and novels have been translated in more than 20 languages, and have traveled the 5 continents; they are produced and presented in theatres around the world, including: Japan, Brazil, Korea, Scandinavia, Germany, Spain, Morocco, Britain, the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Australia.
Wajdi Mouawad won the 1st European Drama Award. The award ceremony will take place on 20 September 2020 in Stuttgart at the Schauspielhaus.