Shelagh Stephenson was born in Northcumberland. She attended Manchester University. She has writen extensive work for BBC Radio and television including "Five Kinds of Silence," winner of Writers Guild Award 1996, and Sony Radio Best Play 1997. The Memory of Water, her first stage play, played at Hampstead Theatre, London in 1996 and subsequently received productions at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago and Manhattan Theatre Club. A highly successful provincial tour transferred to the West End in January of 1999. Her next play, An Experiment With an Air Pump, won the Peggy Ramsay Award 1997, and opened at The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester in February 1998 and received its American premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club in the Fall of 1999. It opened at Hamstead Theatre, London in October 1998. She has just delivered her latest play commissioned by Hampstead Theatre, and is currently under commission to the Royal national Theatre, London. She is also working on a two-part series for the BBC and a British Canadian film. •

Some obersvations on
the nature of memory:

"Remembering is not what you think it is. Remembering is an act of imagination."
—Edmund Blair Bolles

"Our legs and arms are full of torpid memories."
—Marcel Proust

"Appreciating the present and anticipating the future hinge on our ability to communicate with the past. When we lose the capacity to travel through time, we are cut loose from much of what anchors our sense of who we are and where we are headed."
—Daniel L. Schacter