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 10-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 2026 are now open.

Previous fellows:

"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