Red Ellen (NHB Modern Plays)

By Caroline Bird

Forever on the right side of history, but on the wrong side of life, Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson is caught between revolutionary and parliamentary politics as she fights for a better world.

Battling to save Jewish refugees in Nazi Germany; campaigning for Britain to aid the fight against Franco's Fascists in Spain; leading two hundred workers in the Jarrow Crusade against unemployment and poverty... she pursues each cause with a passionate, reckless conviction.

And yet – despite a life spent running into the likes of Albert Einstein and Ernest Hemingway, serving in Churchill's cabinet, having affairs with communist spies and government ministers – she still finds herself, somehow, on the outside looking in.

Caroline Bird's play Red Ellen is the remarkable true story of an inspiring and brilliant woman. It was first produced by Northern Stage, Nottingham Playhouse and the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh in 2022.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Apr 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781788505260

Caroline Bird

Caroline Bird's selected poems, Rookie (2022), and The Air Year (2020) are two of Carcanet's most popular books of the present decade. She won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2020, and has been shortlisted for a number of prizes including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Book Awards, the Ted Hughes Award, the Polari Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. A two-time winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, her first collection Looking Through Letterboxes was published in 2002 when she was fifteen. She won a Cholmondeley Award in 2023.