The Meyer-Whitworth Award was a literary prize established in 1991 and awarded from 1992 until 2011 to new British playwrights to help them further their careers. The £10,000 prize, one of the largest annual prizes for play writing in the UK, was funded by the National Theatre Foundation and named in honour of Geoffrey Whitworth and Carl Meyer, both of whom were instrumental in the establishment of the Royal National Theatre. From its inception until 2006, the award was administered by Arts Council England. After that, it was administered by the Playwrights' Studio, Scotland.[1]
According to the Playwrights' Studio, the award was given to the writer whose play best embodied Whitworth's view that "drama is important in so far as it reveals the truth about the relationships of human beings with each other and the world at large", showed promise of a developing new talent, and whose writing displayed an individual quality.[2] The first recipient of the Meyer-Whitworth Award was Roy MacGregor for his play Our Own Kind.[3]