IASH Creative Fellowship

This Fellowship is open to writers with an idea or story for an ambitious and entertaining new play that speaks to the urgent issues impacting on our lives now and into the future.

Spread across a 9-month period, each fellowship gives the writer the time, space and support needed to research and write the play whilst working around other commitments, being tailored to the writer's needs and availability.

Recipients receive dramaturgical support from the Traverse Literary Department with opportunities for practical development periods working in collaboration with the Traverse Artistic team and other creatives as required.

The Creative Fellowship is a collaboration between IASH and the Traverse Theatre and The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh.

Applications for the IASH Creative Fellowship 2024 are now closed.

Previous fellows:

Michael Patrick and Oisín Kearney are the 2022 Fellows, working on their play Union of Craic.

They are delighted to have been selected for the IASH/Traverse Creative Fellowship and will be developing a play that explores nationalism through The Union of Craic, a new political entity joining Scotland with the island of Ireland. With the constitutional makeup of the British Isles facing uncertainty and nationalist ideals on the rise around the world, they want to write a play that responds to urgent questions of independence and nationalism in biting comedic satire.

Raman Mundair is a creative fellow for 2021/22, utilising digital storytelling.

The piece which Raman will be developing during her Fellowship is a multi-platform storytelling experience employing film, soundscapes and social media which she describes as a 'theatre-film'. Using this range of digital technologies, she will tell a timely story exploring the history of Black and Brown bodies in the Shetland landscape, challenging preconceived notions of who is a Shetlander, who is Scottish, who is British and who is European.

Apphia Campbell was the 2021 Fellow, working on a new play.

The play she worked on during her Fellowship was a bold, tangled morality tale influenced by the great American dramas. Full of soulful and live-stirring gospel singing, it tackles the pressing question of whether a whole community should pay for the sins of an individual - and if good work done can ever compensate for lives ruined on the way.

Apphia continues to work with the Traverse Theatre as an associate artist.

"IASH is a precious island of intelligent, creative, and free discourse. It's an intellectual community in the very best sense of the word: an amazing and astonishing space to write a play in." - Jo Clifford

"The work I've done here includes the final draft of Melody (produced by the Traverse Theatre); a rough first draft of a new play called The Gypsy Grave; an adaptation of an American novel I've titled Mancub and the first act of a play called If Destroyed True (Paines Plough commission) which is the most directly inspired piece from my time here. It's a lot of work, about double what I would normally achieve in the time frame." - Douglas Maxwell

"My time at IASH was extremely productive and memorable. A really special period when I rediscovered the process of writing a play at a desk, which just so happened to be exactly what I needed at exactly the right time. I really valued the cross-pollination process through the IASH structure of lunches and work-in-progress sharings and I felt that my place as a creative writer was of interest as well to the other Fellows." - Clare Duffy