Gail Louw (Levy)

Gail Louw

Gail Louw’s career has followed a rather zig-zag route, as she spent ten years working as a Principle Lecturer and Public Health Programme Leader in the Postgraduate Medical School in Brighton, UK.

Although she had completed a PhD in Organisational Informatics in 1994, she never worked in that field. During her time at the university, she undertook a year’s part time course in dramatic writing and continued to write and work simultaneously until she began to write full time.

Fourteen of her plays have been produced - Blonde Poison being the most well-known as it has had five different productions throughout the world, including at the Sydney Opera House (studio) in Australia in May 2016, and many cities in America including Los Angeles. It has also had two successful runs at the Theatre on the Square in Johannesburg in 2017/2018. It was also on at the Grahamstown Arts Festival Main Stage in July 2016, and was a flagship production at the Hilton Arts Festival. Other plays have performed at the Edinburgh Fringe and throughout the UK. Miss Dietrich Regrets won a Naledi Theatre Award for Best Actress.

Gail has won an Argus Angel Award for Artistic Excellence (2012) and Best New Play at the Brighton Festival (2014). Shackleton’s Carpenter’ continues to tour extensively throughout the UK and Ireland and will have a 3 week run at Jermyn Street London in August 2019, a small theatre in the centre of the West End.

A play about Jacob Zuma and Ronnie Kasrils ‘The Ice-Cream Boys’ will have a 3.5 week run at the same theatre in October 2019. A new play ‘A Life Twice Given’ will tour the UK in October 2019 as well.

She has had three books published by Oberon Books, including two collections of four plays.