David Edgar was born in Birmingham in 1948. He read Drama at Manchester University. After a short career in journalism, he took up writing full-time in 1972.

His original stage plays include The National Interest (1971), Dick Deterred (1974), Saigon Rose (1976), and Entertaining Strangers (1987). His stage adaptations include Albie Sachs' Jail Diary (1978), Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby (1980), winner of the Society of West End Theatres Best Play award and a New York Tony award, Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1991) and Gitta Sereny's Albert Speer (2000). His original plays for the RSC are Destiny (1976), winner of the John Whiting Award, Maydays (1983), winner of the Plays and Players Award for best play, Pentecost (1994), winner of the Evening Standard Play of the Year award and The Prisoner's Dilemma (2001).

With The Shape of the Table (National Theatre, 1990), Pentecost and The Prisoner's Dilemma form a series of plays about Eastern Europe in the wake of the cold war. His two plays about a governor's election on America's west coast (Daughters of the Revolution and Mothers Against, jointly titled Continental Divide) were co-produced by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2003, and will visit London's Barbican Theatre in March 2004.

His work for television includes adaptations of Destiny, screened by the BBC in 1978 and The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, televised by Channel 4 in 1982, as well as the plays Buying a Landslide (1992) and Vote for Them (1989).

He is also the author of the radio plays Ecclesiastes (1977), A Movie Starring Me (1991), Talking to Mars (1996) and an adaptation of Eve Brook's novel The Secret Parts (2000). He wrote the screenplay for the film Lady Jane (1986). He is also the author of The Second Time as Farce: Reflections on the Drama of Mean Times (1988) and editor of The State of Play: Playwrights on Playwriting (2000).

He was Resident Playwright at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1974-5 (Board Member from 1985) and Literary Consultant for the RSC (1984-8).

He founded the University of Birmingham 's MA in Playwriting Studies in 1989 and was its director until 1999. He was appointed Professor of Playwriting Studies in 1995.

David Edgar is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in Birmingham.

To learn more about David Edgar, go to Contemporary Writers.