Barney Norris

Barney Norris FRSL^[1] (born 1987) is a British writer.^[2]

Norris was born in Chichester in West Sussex, later moving to Wiltshire where he attended Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury. He studied English at Keble College, Oxford, and creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

After leaving university, he set up the touring Up in Arms Theatre Company^[3] with the director Alice Hamilton, and worked in the theatre as assistant to Thelma Holt, Michael Frayn, Peter Gill, and Max Stafford-Clark, before becoming a full-time writer. He is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Oxford, and reviews fiction regularly for The Guardian.

Norris's early plays were produced by his company Up in Arms, usually on tour and often in partnership with other theatres.^[4] Following the success of his first full-length play Visitors,^[5] he began to write for other companies, and has since worked with Salisbury Playhouse,^[6] the Bush Theatre,^[7] Oxford Playhouse, the Arcola Theatre, the Royal and Derngate, Out of Joint, the Bridge Theatre and Riverside Studios, among others. His first novel, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain, was published in 2016; he has since published three other novels, including Undercurrent in 2022, and two books of non-fiction.

In February 2024, Norris was announced as the Green Party of England and Wales candidate for the Salisbury constituency at the 2024 general election.^[8]

He has also acted as an ambassador for south-west based homelessness charity Alabare, as a member of the Society of Authors Sustainability Committee and chair of the Scriptwriters Committee, and as a member of the Writers Guild of Great Britain Theatre Negotiating Team.

• 2014 – Critics' Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright for Visitors
• 2015 – Selected as one of the Evening Standard's Progress 1000
• 2016 – Betty Trask Award for Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain
• 2016 – South Bank Sky Arts Times Breakthrough Award for Literature
• 2018 – One Book Award for Turning For Home
• 2018 – Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
• 2019 – Award for Excellence in International Theatre from the International Theatre Institute
• 2023 – Hawthornden Foundation Award

• Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain (2016)
• Turning For Home (2018)
• The Vanishing Hours (2019)
• Undercurrent (2022)

• Visitors (2014, Up in Arms, Arcola Theatre, Bush Theatre and tour)
• Eventide (2015, Up in Arms, Arcola Theatre and tour)
• Echo's End (2017, Salisbury Playhouse)
• While We're Here (2017, Up in Arms, Bush Theatre, BBC Radio 4 and tour)
• Nightfall (2018, Bridge Theatre)
• We Started To Sing (2022, Arcola Theatre)
• The Band Back Together (2024, Arcola Theatre)

• The Remains of the Day (2019, Out of Joint, Northampton Royal and Derngate, Oxford Playhouse and tour)
• Blood Wedding (2020, Up in Arms and Salisbury Playhouse)
• Second Best (2025, Riverside Studios)

• The Wellspring with David Owen Norris (2022, Northampton Royal and Derngate and tour)

• While We're Here (2018, BBC Radio 4)
• Song and Dance (2019, BBC Radio 4)
• The Queen of the Isle of Wight (2021, BBC Radio 4)

• To Bodies Gone: The Theatre of Peter Gill (2014)
• The Wellspring: Conversations with David Owen Norris (2018)

• Official website