Tara Theatre are pleased to announce our longlist for NOVA. We received an overwhelming number of remarkable submissions for our seed commission, and we want to thank every single playwright who took to time to submit their work to our team to read.

The quality was astonishingly high this year and we’re overjoyed to see so many phenomenal playwrights sharing their work with us. Every writer should be immensely proud of their work.

As our flagship new writing programme, NOVA is an open call to uncover fresh South Asian writing talent. Those selected will receive a commission worth £1,500 as well as mentoring and dramaturgical support, resulting in a public performance of their work produced by a professional team.

Our Senior Producer Neena Shea comments “Thank you to everyone who took the time to apply for NOVA, we had over 100 submissions this year which is the most we’ve ever had. We loved reading every idea and getting to know each of the applicants through their work. The aim of NOVA is to expand the canon of South Asian writing; our universe is already so much bigger having read the submissions.”

Next, our team have the difficult task of whittling this down to a shortlist, before announcing the final selection in October. Until then, the full longlist of playwrights for NOVA 2024 can be found below.

NOVA 2024 Longlist

Nikita Aashi Chadha

Amin Ali

Anjeli Chapman Wolf

Ruth D’Silva

Rea Dennhardt Patel

Gurjot Dhaliwal

Vikas Gogana

Abra Hunt

Zahra Jassi

Lavan Jeyarupalingam

Amman Khalid

Nidhi Krishna

Nicole Latchana

Anu Kumar Lazarus

Kayleigh Mai Hinsley

Isobel Mascarenhas-Whitman

Ayan Philip

Aditi Pradhan

Saroja-Lily Ratnavel

Sid Sagar

Sajani

Shezah Salam

Dan Sareen

Rani Selvarajah

Neetu Singh

Pooja Sivaraman

Mekala Sridhar

Nusrath Tapadar

Dilan Tulsiani

Kaya Uppal