Rona Munro’s vividly imagined trilogy The James Plays has won Best New Play at the 60th Evening Standard Theatre Awards, which were held last night (30 November).

The James Plays bring to life three generations of Stewart kings who ruled Scotland in the tumultuous fifteenth century. Each play stands alone as a unique vision of a country tussling with its past and future; viewed together the trilogy creates an intricate and compelling narrative on Scottish culture and nationhood, full of playful wit and boisterous theatricality.

Produced by the National Theatre of Scotland, The James Plays were first performed at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, in August 2014 as part of Edinburgh International Festiva, before later transferring to the National Theatre, London. They received widespread critical acclaim, being called 'a modern classic' (Evening Standard) and 'an astonishing dramatic achievement' (Telegraph).

Two other NHB plays were nominated for the Best New Play award: Mike Bartlett's bold 'future history' play King Charles III, and Lynn Nottage's warm, tender drama about the empowerment of a black seamstress in New York City in 1905, Intimate Apparel.

Another NHB winner on the night was Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies, with Jeremy Herrin scooping the Award for Best Director. Adapted by Mike Poulton, the two-part adaptation of Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize-winning novels, produced by the RSC, is a thrilling and utterly convincing portrait the story of Thomas Cromwell, a brilliant man embroiled in the lethal, high-stakes politics of the Court of Henry VIII. Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies opens on Broadway next year, following hit runs at Stratford-upon-Avon and in London's West End.

As the UK's leading theatre publisher, Nick Hern Books is proud to be involved with the 60th Evening Standard Theatre Awards. As well as their trophy, the winner in each category also took home a NOOK Glowlight, preloaded with plays and books donated by Nick Hern Books, including The James Plays, King Charles III, and My Night with Reg.

Evening Standard Theatre Awards winners - Special Offer

To celebrate their success, we're offering a special deal on The James Plays, winner of the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best New Play, and Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies, winner of the Best Director Award. Get the scripts at 30% off plus free UK p&p when you use the code STANDARD14 at checkout. This offer is valid until Thursday 18 December.

The nominees for the Evening Standard Theatre Awards 2014 were announced today (17 November), with Nick Hern Books plays featuring in a number of different categories.

Three NHB-published works are in the running for Best Play: King Charles III, Mike Bartlett's controversial 'future history' drama that draws on the style and structure of a Shakespearean history play ('theatre doesn't get much better than this' - The Times), The James Plays, a vivid depiction of three kings who ruled Scotland in the tumultuous fifteenth century by Rona Munro ('an astonishing dramatic achievement' - Telegraph) and Intimate Apparel, Lynn Nottage's tender play about the empowerment of a black seamstress in New York City in 1905 ('a defining piece of American drama' - Observer). Intimate Apparel also receives a Best Actress nomination for Tanya Moodie.

Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, adapted by Mike Poulton from Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize-winning novels, picks up two nominations, with Ben Miles and Jeremy Herrin shortlisted for Best Actor and Best Director respectively. The RSC-produced plays will transfer to Broadway following their acclaimed West End run.

Elsewhere, Robert Hastie is nominated for the Emerging Talent Award for his directing work on the Donmar Warehouse revival of Kevin Elyot's award-winning comedy My Night With Reg. The production, praised by Time Out as 'beautifully funny and achingly sad', transfers to the Apollo Theatre from January.

The winners of the 2014 Evening Standard Theatre Awards will be announced on Sunday 30 November.

Evening Standard Theatre Awards nominees - Special Offer

To celebrate our authors' fantastic work, we're offering a special deal on all of the Evening Standard Theatre Award-nominated plays listed above. Get any of the five shortlisted titles - King Charles III, The James Plays, Intimate Apparel, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and My Night With Reg at 25% off plus free UK p&p when you use the code STANDARD14 at checkout. This offer is valid until Friday 28 November.

Nick Hern Books is to publish a special hardback edition of current West End hit King Charles III by award-winning playwright Mike Bartlett, now on at Wyndham's Theatre following its acclaimed premiere at the Almeida Theatre, London.

This special edition of the play, published in beautiful clothbound hardback, includes a foreword by the journalist and broadcaster Jon Snow, an afterword by the playwright, and an essay about the original production. It is due to be published on 30 October.

Queen Elizabeth is dead. After a lifetime of waiting, her son ascends the throne. A future of power. But how to rule?

Mike Bartlett’s controversial ‘future history play’ explores the people beneath their crowns, the unwritten rules of our democracy, and the conscience of Britain’s most famous family.

Drawing on the style and structure of a Shakespearean history play, and written largely in highly accomplished blank verse, King Charles III opened in 2014 at London’s Almeida Theatre, directed by Rupert Goold, before transferring to the West End.

Author Mike Bartlett said: ‘Although plays are written for performance, there’s also a real and equal joy in sitting down to read them, imagining the actors, world, and whole production yourself in whatever way you want. I think King Charles III is absolutely a play that can be read, as well as performed, and I’m thrilled that Nick Hern Books is bringing out this special hardback edition with precisely that in mind.’

Matt Applewhite, Managing Director of Nick Hern Books, said, ‘From my first reading of Mike Bartlett’s brilliant play, it was clear he had written an instant modern classic, whose political and cultural insight is matched by its audacious literary style. It is as much of a pleasure to read on the page as it is to watch in performance, and this special hardback edition will enhance its appeal as a literary work to be read in its own right.’

King Charles III: Special Edition is out 30 October. Pre-order your copy here.

'bold, brilliant and unstoppably entertaining… an intelligent, empathetic, moving look at the power and limitations of the modern monarchy… theatre doesn't get much better than this' The Times

'outstanding and provocative… the most spectacular, gripping and wickedly entertaining piece of lèse-majesté that British theatre has ever seen' Telegraph

'play of the year... extraordinary… a meaty, hilarious, dizzyingly audacious state of the nation political thriller' Time Out

Rona Munro's vividly imagined trilogy The James Plays has been shortlisted for the annual Saltire Society's Literary Book of the Year Award.

Widely regarded as Scotland’s most prestigious book awards, the Saltire Literary Awards are organised by the Saltire Society, a non-political independent charity founded in 1936 which has membership branches throughout Scotland.

Rona Munro's The James Plays trilogy, first seen at this year's Edinburgh International Festival, brings to life three generations of Stewart kings who ruled Scotland in the tumultuous fifteenth century. Praised as 'an astonishing dramatic achievement' (Telegraph) and 'a modern classic' (Evening Standard), the trilogy transferred to the National Theatre, London, in September.

There are five categories at the Saltire Society Literary Awards. The winning book from each will go on to compete for the coveted Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award, which is accompanied by a £10,000 cash prize to the winning author and is sponsored by Creative Scotland.

The winners of all award categories will be announced at a special ceremony on 11 November. For more information about the Awards, and to see the other nominees, click here.

SPECIAL OFFER

To celebrate The James Plays' Saltire Society Literary Awards nomination, we're offering a special discount on the book when purchased via our website. Get 25% off plus free UK p&p - just use the code SALTIRE at checkout. This offer is valid until 11 November 2014.

painfully funny play about motherhood (and fatherhood), about keeping control, and about letting go.

Good friends should be there for one another – no matter what. But when Bea returns home after five years abroad, having made a bold choice about her life, old friends struggle to support her, or even to understand. One night in Brighton, things threaten to slide into chaos...

Starring Helen Baxendale and directed by Charlotte Gwinner, The Distance opens at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 8 October.

To celebrate, we're offering the chance for one lucky person to receive two tickets to a performance of The Distance at the Orange Tree Theatre (subject to availability) plus a free copy of the playscript. Tickets are valid for performances up to 31 October.

For more information, and to enter, click here.

Actions: The Actors' Thesaurus, the first app designed for use in the rehearsal room and based on the bestselling book by Marina Caldarone and Maggie Lloyd-Williams, is now available for iOS devices at the special launch price of £4.99.

Actions: The Actors’ Thesaurus is a fully searchable, easy-to-navigate thesaurus of active verbs, that helps actors refine their acting choice until they find the action they require to make each line come alive.

Features include:

• A to Z search, and predictive search function
• Emotional groupings to help you pinpoint the action you require
• Bookmark, note-making and random word functions
• Share your actions on social media or by email
• Full instructions on how to use actioning in rehearsal, plus how to use the app

For actors at all levels and of all ages, Actions: The Actors’ Thesaurus will revolutionise how you rehearse. Once you’ve started using it, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.

‘If you want to act, or act better, Actions will take you a long way on the journey to excellence’ Terry Johnson

For more information, and to download your copy now, click here.

The initiate, Alexandra Wood's thrilling tale of altruism, greed, and the search for a way to belong, has won a Scotsman Fringe First Award at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

When a British couple are seized by Somali pirates, an East London taxi driver decides to rescue them. Meeting disbelief with determination, he dismisses the fears of his wife and flies out to negotiate their release.

Speeding from the banks of the Thames to the now unfamiliar world of his homeland, he confronts the family he left behind and the bravado of the defiant men he once called brothers.

The Initiate is premiering at this year's Edinburgh Fringe, produced by Paines Plough in their new pop-up Roundabout space.

SPECIAL OFFER

Get 25% off plus free UK p&p on The Initiate and all other NHB Edinburgh 2014 plays - click here to learn more.

NHB is publishing some of the very best work on display at Edinburgh this year, from punchy takes on today's big issues to epic plays about figures from history:

• Britannia Waves the Rules by Gareth Farr
• Freak by Anna Jordan
• The Initiate by Alexandra Wood
• The James Plays by Rona Munro

And to celebrate, we're offering all of them at 25% off plus free UK p&p until the end of August - click here to take advantage of this great offer.

**UPDATE 11 July, 12:05pm - Applications for this position are now closed**

We are seeking a full-time member of staff to manage our digital publishing programme and to work alongside our current production editors at our office in Shepherd’s Bush, West London.

Your responsibilities will include: preparing files in QuarkXPress ready for conversion to digital formats by outside agencies; carrying out rigorous quality assurance checks of the converted files; and liaising with our ebook distributors to ensure the timely delivery of our titles to worldwide markets.

You will take the lead in driving forward our contribution to Drama Online, an online drama resource for educational institutions in partnership with Bloomsbury Publishing.

You will also manage our busy reprint programme, revising texts where necessary, monitoring and replenishing stock of all our titles in conventional print formats and updating existing ebooks as required.

For more information, including how to apply, see here: http://bit.ly/VzsT8N

The winner of the Papatango New Writing Prize 2014 was announced today (30 June), with the award going to Fiona Doyle's lyrical, compassionate and urgent drama Coolatully.

Kilian was once Coolatully's pride and joy, its champion on the hurling field. Now the village can't muster a team, the country's shutting down, and Eilish wants to leave for a new life across the ocean. And this is 2014. As Irish history repeats itself, Kilian must confront the demons of the past and decide whether to stay or go forever.

Coolatully will premiere at the Finborough Theatre, London, in October 2014, and the script will be published by Nick Hern Books. It's available to pre-order now.

Founded in 2009, the Papatango New Writing Prize is a yearly award Previous winners include Foxfinder by Dawn King, Pack by Louise Monaghan and Unscorched by Luke Owen. For more information about the Prize, visit the Papatango website.