The play that lives with me most this year, as I talk in August 2017, is Alice Birch’s remarkable Anatomy of a Suicide.

I first encountered the plays of Howard Brenton right at the beginning of my life as a playwright. Before I’d properly written anything of my own I saw a student production of his 1984 play Bloody Poetry.

The career of Bola Agbaje launched with one of the most confident and exciting debut swaggers in playwriting this century.

The playwright Nick Payne started his professional career in London theatre in one of the most vital and fertile hotbeds of theatrical creativity in the city. Working at the National Theatre bookshop.

Abi Morgan is one of the most prolific and celebrated dramatists of her generation. While she has reached international acclaim for her startling television and film work she began her trade in the theatre and has, over the course of the past two decades, made plays of formal confidence, emotional incision and darting theatricality.

I’m not sure I remember the very first time I met Mike Bartlett. I know he was a participant in one of the Young Writers Groups that I ran at the Royal Court in the early years of the last decade.

Anupama Chadrasekhar was born and raised in Chennai in India’s East Coat, in the heart of the Bay of Bengal. She started writing for theatre in the second half of the last decade when her early plays Closer Apart was produced in her hometown and her next, the self-directed Acid, was produced in Mumbai.

In some ways Nathaniel Martello-White is, of all the writers I’ve spoken to on these podcasts, the least experienced. He has only had two plays produced professionally. Both of them to massive critical acclaim. But in other ways he is far more experienced than all of us.

There is a steel and intelligence at the heart of the plays of EV Crowe that has defined her as one of the most arresting of the exciting group of writers to have emerged out of the Young Writers Programme at the Royal Court in the past decade.

When Roy Williams’ first play No Boys Cricket Club launched him into the London theatre world in 1996 it was celebrated for the audacity and range of its theatrical imagination. At a time when new playwrights were often being encouraged to write simple plays for studio theatres, Roy Williams wrote a play that travelled across oceans, across continents and back in time.

The experience of watching a play that seems in some way to speak directly or resonate in a way that feels disarmingly personal has lead many playwrights to write for the first time. So it was with Penelope Skinner.

I was the Writers Tutor here at the Royal Court Theatre in 2001 when Leo Butler, fresh from a beautiful elegiac theatre debut in the 2000 Young Writers Festival with his play Made of Stone, was given a three month residency and shared his office with me.

Few playwrights can claim to have defined a theatrical form or process with quite the same conviction as Alecky Blythe.

There are very few writers I have interviewed or will interview in these podcasts whose curriculum vitae is longer than mine. And certainly none of those are some years younger than me.

The plays of Timberlake Wertenbaker have been a presence in British theatre since the turn of the 1980s. Since that time she has produced work that is as defined by its sense of poetry and linguistic precision as it is by her characters’ yearning for justice or a sense of a home.

I first met Simon Stephens in 2011. I was an intern here at the Court and was tanning in the garden in my lunchbreak. Simon was here with his play Wastwater and was taking a moment’s break from rehearsals. I had watched a preview the night before.