Penda Diouf (F)

is a French playwright, librettist, and actress of Senegalese-Ivorian heritage whose work explores identity, invisible histories, colonial legacies, and ecological themes. Based in Lille, she began writing plays at nineteen, and her very first work, Poussières, was selected by the Comédie-Française in 2010.

Her play La grande Ourse won the Text’avril Festival Jury Prize in 2018, the Collidram Prize in 2021, and was a finalist for the Prix Sony Labou Tansi in 2022. Her autobiographical play Pistes… won the La Chartreuse reading committee prize and the award for best German radio fiction in 2022, and was broadcast on France Culture. In 2023, she received the SACD Prize for Upcoming Talents, and in 2025 she staged Pistes… herself and created a musical performance with composer Cloé du Trèfle.

Her most recent play, Sœurs, nos forêts aussi ont des épines (2024), was staged in 2025 by director Silvia Costa. Also in 2025, her play May Landschaften received its world premiere at Theater Münster in a German translation. Her plays have been translated into German, English, Portuguese, Armenian, Czech, and Finnish, and she has held writing residencies at the Royal Court in London, the Institut Français in Tunis, the Villa Albertine in New York, and the Théâtre National de Strasbourg. Together with Anthony Thibault, she co-founded Jeunes Textes en Liberté, which supports emerging playwrights and promotes greater diversity in theatre.

Her first novel, about the queer African-American composer Julius Eastman, is forthcoming.

PRIZES/AWARDS:

2023 – SACD Prize for Upcoming Talents
2022 – Prix Collidram for LA GRANDE OURSE
2022 – German Audioplay of the Year for PISTEN…

„In speaking of these deep, lingering wounds that colonialism and racism have inflicted, and how she speaks of them, Diouf does the only thing that can perhaps help, at least a little, to heal trauma: She brings them out of the repressed, the concealed, the forgotten into our consciousness, and she does it in such a poetic and empathetic way that when we listen to her, even white people, descendants of the European colonial powers, are deeply touched and moved to reflect on the causes of these wounds and to relate to them.“ – Jury’s statement (originally in German)