"The European Drama Award closes a significant gap in the promotion of playwrights and demonstrates Baden-Württemberg's close ties with Europe. The award showcases the aesthetic and thematic power of European drama – let's be inspired and roused by it! My thanks go to the state of Baden-Württemberg, Christof Hettich and the SRH, as well as the jurors for their breadth of vision. I extend my heartfelt congratulations to this year's prize winners." - Burkhard C. Kosminski, artistic director of Schauspiel Stuttgart

The British playwright Caryl Churchill is the recipient of the European Drama Award 2022 for her complete works.

The jury, chaired by Peter Michalzik, on the reasoning behind their decision: "Playwright Caryl Churchill, born in 1938, has created a substantial, powerful and very politically engaged body of work over the course of more than 60 years. The diversity of the forms her work takes is a result of the diversity of her themes. Churchill tackles social, human, scientific and political issues. In the 1970s her writing became feminist (and has remained so). At that time she began to explore themes of gender and sex, racism and colonialism. In the 1980s, she took aim at financial capitalism, using the City of London as an example. In her numerous plays, she has sharply laid bare different power structures. Since the late 1990s, her work has shown a marked interest in Eastern Europe.
Her best-known and most important works include Cloud Nine (1979), which explores imperialist thinking, Top Girls (1982), about women in a man's world, A Mouthful of Birds (1986), in which she combined spoken word theatre with dance theatre for the first time, Serious Money (1987), a play written in verse, Blue Heart (1997), and A Number (2002), broaching questions of cloning and human identity. Love and Information (2012) and Ding Dong the Wicked (2013) deal with fundamental human questions.
Caryl Churchill continues to write to this day. In the great tradition of English-language literature, she created incisive dialogues along with onomatopoeic text surfaces. Her plays have surreal but also realistic traits. In addition to her intensive collaboration with dance theatre, which has inspired numerous continental European dramatists, she has also worked for musical theatre productions on many occasions. With her work, which is demanding in form and content, Churchill has repeatedly challenged critics and audiences. Caryl Churchill is one of the greatest living playwrights. Her work is well known but not famous and now only rarely performed. Time for a reassessment and reconsideration."

The European New Talent Drama Award 2022 will be awarded to the Ukrainian playwright Lena Lagushonkova.

This year's sole juror, Marius Ivaškevičius, Lithuanian playwright, essayist, prose author, screenwriter, journalist and director reflects on the winner: "Lena Lagushonkova, a young Ukrainian playwright from Luhansk – now living in Kyiv – writes in her plays about the life of a young woman against the backdrop of revolution and war. The short dialogues and monologues in her plays are imbued with spare, direct language and sharp-witted humour. Her trilogy consists of the plays Gorky's Mother, PGT and My banner was pissed on by a cat. The latter is about her efforts to lose her virginity during the Euromaidan Uprising in Ukraine. She recounts historical events in Ukraine and her life in the occupied territory of Luhansk. The narrative – based on fragments of everyday life – develops into an epic drama: war, poverty, devastation and the agonising recognition of people and their actions. It is at once comedy and tragedy.Today, Lena lives in a terrible new reality – in a Kyiv besieged by Putin's army. I told her that she could expect a most pleasant surprise in the autumn. She replied: "Thank you very much. I hope I'll still be alive then." Before adding: "It is terrible. But I'm not crying."

The presentation of the European Drama Award 2022 to Caryl Churchill and the European New Talent Drama Award 2022 to Lena Lagushonkova will take place at the Schauspielhaus of the Stuttgart State Theatres on the weekend of 18 - 20 November 2022. The programme follows.