Gail Louw

Gail Louw (1951)[1] is a South African-born British playwright.

Biography

Born Gail Levy in Johannesburg on 13 October 1951 to a middle class Jewish family. She left South Africa to live in Israel after finishing school at 17, becoming one of the first students on the Mount Scopus campus in Jerusalem. Returning to Johannesburg she continued her studies in 1971 at the University of the Witwatersrand, completing a degree in English and a teachers’ diploma.

In 1976 she moved to Brighton in England where she had a variety of jobs, including teaching at the University of Brighton and becoming the Progamme Leader in Public Health at the Institute of Postgraduate Medicine.

Her career in theatre

She took a Postgraduate Diploma and later an MA in Dramatic Writing at Sussex University in 2000. With the support of New Writing South she was taken under the wing of Tony Milner from New Vic Productions who produced and directed many of her earlier plays. She went on to write numerous plays on a range of topics, a number of them inspired by Jewish expriences and life in South Africa under Apartheid.

Contribution to South African theatre, film, media and performance

Among the plays produced in South Africa have been Blonde Poison (written 2011, first performed in South Africa in 2016), perhaps Louw's best known and most accomplished play, and Miss Dietrich Regrets (written 2015, performed in South Africa 2017), The Good Dad . I