Nick Hern Books has joined forces with Salisbury Playhouse, Out of Joint, the BBC Writersroom and the National Association of Youth Theatres to launch A Play for the Nation’s Youth, a new competition to discover the next great play for young people.

The chosen playwright will win £1000 seed commission and will be given support including dramaturgy, mentoring, theatre workshops and a public staged reading with professional actors and young people. There is also the possibility that a successful development period could lead to a production and publication.

Each writer is asked to submit at least 25 pages of a new and unperformed piece for young people aged 11-19 years which can either be an original play or an adaptation of a copyright free text. There should be roles for at least 20 young people but adult roles may also feature.

Award-winning playwright and NHB author Fin Kennedy, who has frequently worked in collaboration with school children, says:

‘Youth theatre is where I started out, and where many of the playwrights, actors and directors of tomorrow still try out their skills. It's a sector we should rightly be nurturing so it's great to see such an imaginative professional partnership coming together to do just that. I wish them all the best and will be watching the results with interest!'

For more information, including instructions on how to submit your play, click here.

Nick Hern Books has a strong tradition of publishing plays for young people, including works by leading playwrights such as Fin Kennedy and Stuart Paterson. Recent publications include Ali Taylor’s adaptation of Robert Westall’s Carnegie medal-winning novel The Machine Gunners, Mike Kenny’s dramatisation of Kenneth Grahame’s classic tale The Wind in the Willows, and Helen Edmundson and Neil Hannon’s version of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, which was nominated for the Ned Sherrin Award for Best Musical at the Evening Standard Awards 2012.