Often called the ¡°Akutagawa Prize of theater,¡± the Kunio Kishida Prize for Playwriting recognizes literary merit and encourages experimentation and artistic exploration in contemporary Japanese drama by awarding the best script for a play.
Winning a Kishida Prize often leads to more opportunities for performance success, of course, as any list of past winners shows. Many established playwrights won the award early in their careers, such as Hisashi Inoue (1972), Hideki Noda (1983) and Keralino Sandorovich (1999), whose ¡°The Last Don Quixote¡± won this year¡¯s Yomiuri Theater Award for Best Play. The Yomiuri Award is another prestigious accolade for theater. It focuses on the play as a performance, while the Kishida Prize prioritizes the dramatic text.
Established by the Hakusuisha Publishing House in 1955, which also publishes the journal ¡°Shingeki¡± (New Theater), the Kishida Prize marks its 70th iteration this year.
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