This is the third edition of Caryl Churchill for the series Writers and their Work. First published in 1997, the original monograph set out to provide a critically informed and accessible approach to Churchill's playwriting from the early years through to the 1994 production of The Skriker. Chapters one to five constitute the text of the first edition: a survey of Churchill's early writing for radio, television and theatre (Chapter 1); the importance of Churchill's theatre to contemporary women's drama and feminist theatre scholarship (Chapter 2); the socialist canvas of her playwriting (Chapter 3); the representation of oppressed communities (Chapter 4); and her ‘shapeshifting’, experimental approaches to writing for theatre and performance (Chapter 5). In 2001 Northcote House published a second, updated edition of the study for which I wrote Chapter 6 which gives an account of Churchill's work from 1997 through to the production of Far Away in 2000. Chapter 7, written for this 2009 third edition, catches up with Churchill; details her most recent plays at the Royal Court Theatre, London.

In 2008 Caryl Churchill celebrated her seventieth birthday - a celebration she shared with the Royal Court, the theatre with which she has been most closely associated since its staging of Owners in the Upstairs studio space back in 1972. Feted as one of the most formally innovative and politically incisive dramatists writing for the contemporary stage, Churchill's capacity for theatrical invention and political intervention remains undiminished. While her socialist dream of a ‘decentralized, nonauthoritarian’ society now seems an increasingly remote, ‘far away’, possibility, Churchill remains fiercely opposed, as her theatre attests, to the nightmarish intensification, rather than diminution, of capitalist greed, volence, terror and damage that Churchillian landscapes now point to as occurring on a global scale. Hers is a radical theatre voice, steadfast in its creative and political address of the dangerous consequences of a failure to believe in and to realize more egalitarian and less damaged futures. The words of Churchill's Nell, the most outspoken, radical, female protestor in Fen and, like Churchill, an accomplished teller of ‘frightening’ stories, seem apposite - ‘I won't turn back for you or anyone’.