Lolita Chakrabarti OBE is an award-winning playwright and actress.
Her most recent written work includes: Hymn at the Almeida Theatre, which was live streamed during the pandemic and opened live to audiences in July 2021, a stage adaptation of Booker prize winning novel Life of Pi (winner of 4 UK Theatre Awards including Best New Play and WhatsonStage award for Best New Play) for Sheffield Crucible, which transfers to Wyndhams Theatre in November, and an adaptation of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a collaboration with Rambert and 59 Productions which premiered at Manchester International Festival and played at Brisbane Festival.
Lolita curated The Greatest Wealth, a celebration of the NHS at The Old Vic in 2018, where she commissioned 8 monologues to celebrate each decade of the NHS and she also wrote one entitled Speedy Gonzalez. The Greatest Wealth was relaunched online as a collection of short films in 2020 with a new monologue commissioned by Booker prize winning Bernardine Evaristo.
Lolita’s play Red Velvet premiered at the Tricycle Theatre before transferring to New York and the West End. It was nominated for nine major awards, earning Lolita the Evening Standard Theatre Award and Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright.
Acting credits include: Fanny & Alexander (The Old Vic) and Hamlet directed by Kenneth Branagh at RADA, Vigil (BBC), Criminal (Netflix), To Provide All People, One Night, J K Rowling’s A Casual Vacancy, Defending The Guilty (BBC), Born to Kill (CH4), My Mad Fat Diary 3 (E4), Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands, Vera, Jekyll and Hyde (ITV), Riviera, Delicious (Sky) and the forthcoming Wheel of Time (Amazon Prime) and Showtrial (BBC).