The Nick Hern Books Modern Plays collection includes over 900 plays from many of the UK and Ireland’s preeminent playwrights, as well as exciting new voices. It offers a wide and varied range of award-winning and widely studied plays, and is continually updated with new works fresh from leading theatres.
Giant by Mark Rosenblatt - Rosenblatt’s searing debut about Roald Dahl and antisemitism won 2025’s Olivier and Critics' Circle Awards for Best New Play.
The Years by Annie Ernaux adapted by Eline Arbo - performed in the West End to 5-star reviews, this is a powerful adaptation of Ernaux's account of a woman's personal and political life in the post-war years.
Otherland by Chris Bush - a bold, genre-smashing exploration of gender identity and what it means to be true to yourself, Otherland was a finalist for the 2025 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.
A Good House by Amy Jephta - a funny and provocative drama about race, resentment and community politics from the acclaimed South African playwright.
Other highlights:
Caryl Churchill: Over 40 plays by one of our greatest living writers, which blend stunning formal innovation with a clear-eyed, unflinching look at the world around us - including Escaped Alone (2016), Far Away (2000), and A Number (2002)
Top contemporary Irish playwriting: Includes strikingly original works by Enda Walsh such as Disco Pigs, Misterman and Ballyturk, and uncanny, heartfelt plays by Conor McPherson (“quite possibly the finest playwright of his generation” New York Times) including The Weir, The Seafarer, and The Night Alive
The Terence Rattigan collection: 16 plays by one of the twentieth-century’s leading dramatists, including devastating masterpiece The Deep Blue Sea, legal and family drama The Winslow Boy, and one-act play The Browning Version, twice adapted for film