Lolita Chakrabarti OBE is an actress and award-winning playwright. Her adaptation of the Booker Prize winning novel Life of Pi won her the prestigious Olivier Award for Best Play and, after running for over 14 months in the West End and selling out in Boston, US, opened on Broadway in March 2023. This production won 5 Olivier Awards, 4 UK Theatre Awards and 3 Tony Awards and a WhatsonStage Award for Best Play, amongst others. Weeks after making her Broadway debut, Hamnet, adapted by Lolita from the best-selling novel, opened for a sold-out run at the RSC. Hamnet transferred to London’s West End in September 2023. Her debut play Red Velvet opened at the Tricycle Theatre, London, before transferring to St Ann’s Warehouse in New York and then to London’s West End as part of Sir Kenneth Branagh’s season at The Garrick Theatre. It earned her the Evening Standard Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright 2012; The Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright 2013; AWA for Arts and Culture 2013 and an Olivier Award nomination for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre 2012, as well as many other nominations. Red Velvet is now on the Drama syllabus for A level, is studied at universities in the UK and USA and there have been over twenty five professional productions in the USA and beyond.
Other writing credits include: Hymn (Almeida Theatre/ Sky Arts); an adaptation of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (Manchester International Festival and Brisbane Festival); Stones of Venice, a VR film for New Vision Arts Festival in Hong Kong; she curated The Greatest Wealth (The Old Vic) celebrating 8 decades of the NHS, which was also shown online during the pandemic; she was dramaturg on Message in a Bottle (ZooNation/Sadler’s Wells and Sylvia for the Old Vic.
Acting credits include: Fanny and Alexander (The Old Vic); Hamlet, alongside Tom Hiddleston, (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), Vigil, Showtrial, The Casual Vacancy (BBC); Wheel of Time (Amazon Prime); Born to Kill (Channel 4); My Mad Fat Diary (E4), Beowulf; Return to the Shieldlands (ITV); Riviera (Sky); Criminal (Netflix) and Screw (Channel 4). She can soon be seen on Apple TV and returns to Radio 4 in 2024 as Dr Alex Bridges in This Thing of Darkness.
